metarand

Announcing MySpace devJams across Australia

Following on from an awesome devJam in Sydney on June 5th, I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to be hosting a further three events in Australia in July.

These events are a must attend for everyone who codes and has an interest in building social media apps.

There will be door prizes and the opportunity to head over to San Francisco and/or Tokyo - read more about these opportunities and each of the events from the following links:

• Sydney July 12
• Melbourne July 19
• Games July 26

We are working on rolling out similar events in other major cities across Australia.

I’d like to thank the guys from Mitchellake for providing us with their uber cool offices for these events.

Tags: devJam

Borders Sells Off Australia

Borders has finalized the sale of its Australian, New Zealand and Singapore businesses in a transaction worth approximately $104M.

The purchaser, Pacific Equity Partners-owned book retailer A&R Whitcoulls Group Holdings, had to front up with $90M in cash and will also make deferred payments of $14M. In exchange they’ll add 30 bookstores to their portfolio.

Whitcoulls was formerly known as WH Smith Asia Pacific and its portfolio of book and related products companies includes Angus & Robertson, Whitcoulls, Calendar Club, Supanews and a Travel division.

Tags: Borders, Pacific Equity Partners, Whitcoulls

Are The Odds Stacked Against The Mobile Internet Being A Success?

There is a lot of buzz these days around the mobile Internet. Kleiner Perkins has set up an iPhone venture fund and Metarand itself has included two mobile ventures in its top three Australian social media startups for 2008.

But there are caveats and traps waiting for the uninitiated in this arena. Joi Ito explains:

I don’t think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile networks that actually work are built on infrastructure that is operated by a small number of mobile operators who use a lot of regulated and closed technology.

Joi compares the open innovation culture that exists within the broader Internet arena with the telco landscape which conists of overregulated, giant vendor ecologies.

He makes a very good point. Countries that have a small number of dominant telcos are littered with the remains of former bright-eyed startups who thought they could feed off the giants.  Only to find that they were not able to get their product onto the carrier any time under an 18 month lead time. And when they finally do get on-deck they are squeezed on price and the carrier’s sales staff do not push them to their customers.

The odds are stacked big time, but for companies who are able to work their way around a reliance on carriers there is loads of upside.

[via Boing Boing, picture courtesy of Mixmaster]

Tags: Boing Boing, Joi Ito

Mobile Virtual Worlds: Android Takes Over Second Life

Tokyo-based Eitarosoft has developed a 3D virtual world service running on Google’s mobile platform Android.

Called Lamity, this virtual world can be accessed via any Android-mounted mobile device. In addition, up to 400 users can simultaneously access the same space on Lamity. This is more than ten times the number who can hang out together in the same place in Second Life.

Eitarosoft’s shareholders include tier one Japanese investment groups such as Japan Asia Investment, JAFCO, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and Nomura Securities.

They have a strong background in mobile 3D, having developed the first i-mode application to display 3D graphics in 2002.

Lamity includes multiple and dual chat features. It also allows for web pages to be viewed simultaneously and stream video through a built-in movie function. A trailer for the movie “Vantage Point” was distributed through this feature ahead of its February premier.

Tags: Android, Eitarosoft, Lamity, Second Life

A Call For Worldwide Solidarity: Global Mourning Period In Support Of China’s Earthquake Victims

The Chinese government has called for a 3-day mourning period to honor the passing of thousands of civilians killed in the recent Sichuan Wenchang earthquake.

As part of this call, they have issued an edict that entertainment-based websites and programming shut down over this period.

A bitchmeme sprung up around this on Friendfeed with some high profile bloggers jumping into the fray and causing tempers to rise amongst Chinese bloggers.

I can understand the tug between total freedom (as perceived  by many of us westerners) and the authoritarian approach of the Chinese government. However, looked at in context this is a significant inflection point. Paul Denlinger explains that in terms of China’s track record of not openly recognizing calamities, calling for this 3-day mourning period is a significant step forward.

Looked at in the broader 2008 context of the upcoming Olympic Games and the growing level of angst and misunderstanding between the peoples of China and the West, I believe we should come together and embrace this mourning period globally.  In the spirt of unity that the Olympics signify let us unite around Paul’s simple rule:

If you reach out and treat people like friends, they tend to act like friends…

Remember, earthquakes are a global phenomenon and can happed anywhere, anytime — how would you like to have the world react to such a disaster happening near you. As I was writing this a small earthquake was recorded in Central California measuring 2.6.

[Picture courtesy of yelingyang]

Tags: China, Earthquake, Friendfeed, Olympics

China’s Leading Blogger Shares Nation’s Thoughts On Olympics

Hong Huang spent her youth in the US before returning to China to become the country’s top blogger. She is intimately tapped into the country’s zeitgeist both through her role in the media and her family’s place in defining its culture - her mother was Mao Zedong’s English teacher.

In this fascinating interview she talks about her country’s nationalism and pride and how the people see the Olympics as a window into their world.

[Hat tip to @kaiserkuo]

Tags: China, Hung Huang, Olympics

Announcing the Metarand 2008 Top 3 Australian Social Media Startups

After extensive analysis of the Australian startup scene, we’ve chosen three companies we believe are ahead of the game in the fast growing social media space.

In aggregate, these three companies have raised over $31 million in venture funding, including from tier one Silicon Valley VC firms, and have many millions of users in over 200 countries around the world.

THE 2008 TOP 3

The Top 3 startups are mig33, BluePulse and RedBubble.

More details on each company are provided below, followed by the criteria used to determine which companies were chosen.

MIG33
URL: www.mig33.com
Location: Burlingame, California
Funding: Series A, $10M (Technology Venture Partners, Accel Ventures, Redpoint Ventures), Series B, $13.5M (Doll Capital Management + Series A investors)
CEO: Steven Goh

Mig33 is a mobile social media company. The company was founded in 2005 in Perth. They currently have 13 million users in over 200 countries (adding four million subscribers in less than eighteen months). With around 1.5 billion messages a month, mig33 sends over 45 million messages a day.
The product is an integrated mobile download application that offers mobile users cheaper VoIP calls and data rates. Users can email, send instant messages, create chat rooms, text message, have profiles and share photos.
The team includes Marty Wells, former CEO of another Australian startup, Tangler.

BLUEPULSE
URL: www.bluepulse.com
Location: San Mateo, California
Funding: Series A, $6M (Vantage Point Ventures)
CEO: Ben Keighran

Bluepulse is a mobile social media company. Founded in early 2006 in Sydney, the company launched its mobile social networking application in December 2006.
They currently have over 6 million users in more than 198 countries. They are facilitating 150 million messages a month and have an advertising based revenue model.
The team includes Chris Nguyen, former Director of Engineering at Google, where he was responsible for the operations of Google Apps.
The product is a free mobile social messenger service, that includes a universal in/outbox, group messaging and a newsfeed feature.

REDBUBBLE
URL: www.redbubble.com
Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Funding: Seed, $2M (undisclosed)
Executive Chairman: Martin Hosking

RedBubble is an online marketplace for artists and art lovers, which provides community features, transactional interaction and fulfillment capabilities. The company was founded in 2006 and launched in February 2007.
Currently they have approximately 50 million page views a month, with 7,000 registered member artists and 60,000 images for sale and this is growing at 75% a month.
Co-founder Martin Hosking was a founder of LookSmart. The other co-founders are Peter Styles and Paul Vanzella.
It’s free to register and upload art, which is aimed at taking away the risk for artists. RedBubble charges a base price for images, calculated on the cost of materials to produce the artwork.

CRITERIA
In determining which companies would make the Top 3 social media startups, we looked at three key factors:

TIME
The first determinant was how long the company has been in operation. Any longer than three years, and it is not seen as a startup anymore. In addition, the company must have started its life as an Australian company and be operating in the social media arena with a key focus on end users and not be an enterprise player.

TRACTION
The second determinant focused on how much traction the company has achieved. This is mainly determined by how many users a company has and how much their product is being used.
Other factors taken into account here include, what partnerships does the company have in place and how much capital it has raised and from whom - angels, strategic investors or professional VCs.

TRAJECTORY
The third determinant looked at how much energy and buzz surrounds the company. How big is the market they are playing into. What is their ability to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

In determining the Top 3, we analysed over 120 startups and noted an increasing level of activity in social media in Australia.

In Metarand’s view there has never been a better time to launch a social media venture than right now. The Top 3 are testament to the fact that it is possible to attain instant global reach and that the can do, entrepreneurial sprit is alive and well in Australia.

Tags: BluePulse, Metarand Top 3, mig33, RedBubble

Australia Glaringly Absent From World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies

The first thing that struck me when I scanned BusinessWeeks’s list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world was that there was not even one Australian company on the list.

You might think that the list would be US-centric and yes, the number 1 and 2 spots are held by Apple and Google, but third up is Japan’s Toyota with the Tata Group of India in 6th place.
It would also be easy to be dismissive and say that only countries with the right size in population or economy could produce highly innovative companies, but how does this explain Canada’s appearance at number 13, courtesy of Research in Motion.

Nor does the list only include well established economies - Samsung brings South Korea in at number 26.
There is so much potential in Australia that I am almost dumbfounded that we have not been able to put ourselves amongst the Top 50. We were able to rise to the top within the sports arena through sheer focus and hard work - it is high time this translated across into business.

INNOVATION TIMING
As the business cycle enters a period of battening down the hatches, there will be those Australian executives who’ll say that they are glad they didn’t commit to an innovation strategy.
But they’d be dead wrong. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sums it up, “My view is there’s no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough - and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about.”
“Constraints drive innovation.” Amazon, which is number 11 on the list, innovated its now widely emulated affiliates program to compensate for a lack of marketing budget.
The key takeout from his interview: Innovation does not require big budgets, but it does require “thoughtfulness and focus on the customer”.
The time to innovate is now.

[Picture courtesy of netsrot]

Join the Conference Chaser for the Sydney MySpace Developer Platform Kickoff

 

UPDATE: Watch the recording of the livestream from the event.

I’ve been spearheading the launch of the MySpace Developer Platform in Australia and New Zealand over the past few weeks and I’m real excited to be emceeing the kickoff event tomorrow evening. We’ve had overwhelming interest from developers and social media entrepreneurs and have had to close registrations - sorry, guys if you’re not yet on the attendee list…

But we do have a solution for those of you who are not able to come along physically. Phil Morle has kindly offered to act as Conference Chaser for the event and will be swarming folks in and doing a livestream of the event.  The event will be highly interactive and I’ll be fielding questions both from the floor and through Phil so jump on in:

 

Mobile GPS as standard - privacy versus safety

Your choice - lose your loved one or your privacy.

South Korea is looking into equipping new mobile phones with a chip that will allow users to be located via satellite-based positioning technology.

The argument being put forward in a bill before their National Assembly is that this move will assist in reducing kidnapping and other increasingly violent crimes against women and children.

I know there is the slippery slope argument of benevolent versus big brother government and in no other region of the world is this better illustrated - South Korea doing this versus North Korea ….shudder.

However, where we have the technology to eradicate location-based crimes this, to me, far outweighs privacy issues.

DNA tracking would be optimal - this is not that far off.

[via China View]