metarand

The Big Picture: A Vision For Social Media

Imagine a world in which:

every single human being is posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

This is the world that New York-based VC, Fred Wilson, sees within his ‘grand vision‘ for social media.

I applaud Fred’s simplicity. All too often the bigger picture can become obscured by over complication. If we take a look through his firm’s portfolio, we quickly see that he is pulling together a mosaic that will progress us towards achieving his vision:

Twitter - microblogging

Disqus - distributed comments

Oddcast - conversational chararacters

Tumblr - microblogging

Zynga - social gaming

There are a bunch of other companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio, but these are the stand out ventures that speak to Fred’s simple vision.

Turning this vision into reality will take a lot more determined effort by all of us. Besides supporting the right technology pieces, achieving standards (think what Gears is doing for HTML5), and gaining wide user traction there are regulatory and plumbing issues that will need to be solved.

Currently we see a lot of infighting and an almost continuous bitchmeme, at present this seems to be over whether Friendfeed is better than Twitter. And this within the context of a world in which millions are unable to express themselves, a world in which millions are dying because of oppressive regimes.

It is high time the social media industry rallied together. By focusing on this simple end goal, by setting a target we can come together around, we can achieve so much more.

[Picture courtesy of hellomartin]

Tags: disqus, Fred Wilson, oddcast, tumblr, Twitter, Union Square Ventures, Zynga

Betaworks Business Creation Platform: Blodging The Incubator Model

Writing on Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget takes a look at Betaworks, a company that is innovating the incubator model.

I totally agree with Henry that the start-up value creation sweet spot lies somewhere between VC firm and operating company. The trick though is in building a model that does not denigrate any one part of the continuum required to produce stellar results. Scale is the big issue.

I’ve had a fair bit of time to play with the model over the past decade - as an intrapreneur within a large publishing house, as CEO of a “distributed” incubator (we leveraged our partners facilities and worked with a portfolio spread across Australia), and as an executive at what is arguably the southern hemisphere’s biggest incubator (an ICT research centre of excellence with 600 staff in 5 labs).

My take is that there is no perfect model — one can crystallize a set of processes (at the ICT CoE we had a detailed set of procedures, a multi-stage gating process, internal fund, Entrepreneur in Residence Program and more committees than you could shake a stick at) - but if you do not allow the magic to happen, if you do no create a playground for mavericks then you will starve your pipeline.

I recall having a number of discussions with Evan Williams at Obvious about creating a product factory. It seems that they’ve got their hands full with an initial king hit, Twitter. And that is another key factor with the model — there is always the temptation to drop everything and pile into what looks like a winner.

I really like the approach Betaworks is taking though. Instead of providing the commoditized solutions traditionally associated with incubators (accounting, hr, legal, blah) they focus on a set of core capabilities - software / IP, knowledge, data, standards, analytics, leadership, tools.

By providing the playground for experimentation, they are able to enable magic. Time will tell how well they scale and remain focused.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: Betaworks, Henry Blodget, Incubators

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

Web 2.i - It’s Time To Enter Beta

Elias Bizannes has written a post about the Web 2.0 era and what’s next. His post is titled It’s all still alpha in my eyes, and he’s issued a call out to get metarand’s views.

First up, I’d say it is high time we realized that Web 2.0 has entered beta - as Elias points out and as we saw at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, big business has entered the space - big time.

Secondly, I’d like to postulate that this beta version of the web should be called Web 2.i. Here’s why I’m adding the “i”:

* iPhone: I agree with Elias that the mobile web will be a big part of this next phase, that is, the mobile web as defined by the iPhone. This device has created a ripple that will radically alter the mobile pond;

* meshed data/presence: The “i” in dataportability will coalesce with the “i” in presence (go with me on this) to create a far more integrated individual web experience.

In short, I agree with the twitterquote from Dave Winer in Elias’s post: Web 2.0 is now over.

It’s time for Web 2.i…

[Pictures courtesy of bwr, saufnase]

Tags: Future, Mobile, Web 2.0, Web 2.i

Microsoft Provides Mesh for Apps/Data, But Fails On Interoperability

I’ve covered DataPortability. I’m experimenting with Friendfeed. I share apps across my Macbook Pro and iPhone.

However, I still feel there is a long way to go before we reach true seamless interoperability of data, connections, applications and devices.

And so I am very excited by Microsoft’s preview beta launch of Live Mesh, a feed-centric programming model.

The promise is that:

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about - available wherever you happen to be.

That is a very noble sentiment. I applaud Ray Ozzie’s vision.

But wait a minute - this only works on devices running Microsoft software. I fully understand that they are only at beta. I also hear their plaintive cry, but we are bringing out Mac and mobile versions later this year.

Fail. They should have built in true interoperability from the get go, across all devices - period. Doing so in stages can only lead to a Here, there, everywhere patchwork.

UPDATE: Former Microsoftie Robert Scoble has gushed his views out. Yes I also like the dialogic RSS capability, by Robert you sum up why its a fail before its even out of the blocks:

Mac support? Coming in the future. Nokia support? Unclear. iPhone support? Ask Steve Jobs (translation: will be very limited due to Apple’s complete control of that platform). Firefox support? Yes! Linux support? What’s that?

[Via TechCrunch]

Tags: DataPortability, iPhone, Live Mesh, Macbook, Microsoft

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]

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]

Entrepreneurs in Residence infuse Energy into National Labs

When I first joined Australia’s leading ICT Centre of Excellence, NICTA, and took charge of putting in place a tech transfer process and building a pipeline of commercial activity, I immediately recognized the need to infuse an entrepreneurial culture into the organization.

Borrowing from my experience as an early stage venture capitalist, I set up what was then a unique Entrepreneurs in Residence Program and we had an initial EiR from mid 2005.

After a very well received roadshow in Silicon Valley in March 2006 we brought on board a further two EiRs into a well structured 12 month program. The Selection Committee included three VC firm partners in the program. These VCs acted as sounding boards for the EiRs as they converged on the project they would lead to spin out.

I won’t go into details on the entire process, but will say that it produced excellent results including spin outs which were funded by some of the VC partners in the program.

I’m now pleased to be able to point to a major boost in Entrepreneurs in Residence within research labs courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Kleiner Perkins and Foundation Capital will place EiRs into the National Renewable Energy Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab. In addition, ARCH Venture Partners will place an EiR into the Sandia National Lab.

You can read more about the program here.

In my view, EVERY research lab should partner with such a program. It not only acts as a major catalyst for creating the right entrepreneurial culture, but done right can have a major impact both in terms of accelerating time to market and in getting the DNA of a successful start up right from the get go.

At Facebook Value: Can an app developer IPO north of $2 billion?

On the eve of over US$60 million in VC fundraisings by apps developers I found attendees at Sydney’s recent Facebook Developer Garage highly motivated to talk value.

I’ve covered the event in the NEXT section of the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, but here are some additional notes that never made it to print.

Lee Lorenzen noted via video at the event that once acquired as a registered customer, between 50-80% of users will opt out of receiving email marketing from the website owner. This means there is little opportunity to engage in dialogue with these users who the website owner has paid to acquire. This situation is reversed on Facebook as application owners have multiple opportunities to converse with users.
Slide has approximately 74 million Facebook app installs. This gives them tremendous reach and allows them to touch a high percentage of the Facebook audience, some 5-6 million daily active users a day. Lee Lorenzen feels this is rationale for the US$550 million valuation they received recently when raising their fourth round of funding of US$50 million. In the United States, the Slide userbase by itself represents the third largest, app-centric, social network.
He believes that Slide, “anticipates an IPO within the next 12 months that will be north of US$2 billion.”

Echoing Lee Lorenzen’s views, the organiser of Silicon Valley Developer Garages, Stanley Wong said, “Social media applications are unlike any type of websites in the past mostly due to the fact that they are so viral. It is unheard of before for an application to have 5 million new application installs in 5 weeks starting from zero.”
“ As a result there is a lot of competition for the attention of Facebook users and a ton of developers are jumping into this fray. Developers are already building networks of apps around particular interests so consolidation is another factor that is happening.”
The value of a Facebook user is linked to their use of applications on the social network. In turn, the ability to monetise these applications and convert user value into real value comes down to the performance of these applications.

In the article I mention Slide’s daily active user rate of 12% as being an example of a higher engagement app (most apps range between 1-2% DAU). By contrast Creative Enclave’s massively multiplayer Facebook game, Imperial Galaxy, has achieved an average daily active user rate of circa 35% since launching the beta version just over a month ago.
One benefit of events such as the Facebook Developers Garage is that they form a key foundation stone for making connections, they are core building blocks for innovation and entrepreneurialism.
Look at Europe. Fifteen years ago the continent had little in the way of a solid pipeline for networking amongst technology professionals. Whereas today there is a relative plethora of events - Barcamp, VentureCamp, LeWeb3, Web 2.0 Berlin, the Plugg Conference and the list goes on.
Writing for well known technology blog, Techcrunch, Mike Butcher argues that these events have been a key reason for Europe coming of age as a technology investing arena. Events hardwire the network and once hardwired it becomes easier for professional investors to ply their trade.
As a result the continent has reached the maturation point where it has specialised investor capital available for each stage of a company’s development. From initial seed investors, through startup and expansion capital and on to growth equity and finally buyout. Europe now boasts a crop of successful VC-backed companies like MySQL, which progressed along the venture continuum and was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Sriram Krishnan is one of the organisers of similar events in Singapore, where he has found there to a lot of demand from application developers and corporates interested in developing Facebook applications.
There is now a growing community of developers and the National University of Singapore (emulating the highly successful Stanford FB apps class run by BJ Fogg and Dave McClure) has set up a class focused on developing Facebook appliations. Mr Krishnan is keen to make his next event a simultaneous three-way between Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Stockholm.
As a web community software pundit for a decade, Londoner Toby Beresford was blown away by the Facebook platform when it launched in May 2007.
“The Facebook platform provides a socialised newsfeed, easy authentication, frictionless application install, instant social network and consistent user interface. Pretty hard to beat as a platform to release a new application on.”
He has been organising Facebook Developer Garages ever since and sees these events as a forum to discuss the latest changes on the platform. Like in other cities, developers have left the London events feeling inspired to write apps. For example the review of the Affiliate Window app at an event directly correlated into a spate of shopping apps.
Commenting after a Facebook Garage in Cape Town, Hannes Foulds said, “Right know I just want to sit down and create my killer Facebook application!”

Mr Beresford notes that, “Facebook is very popular in the United Kingdom, it’s hard to express how much it has entered the every day lives of millions of people. Amongst graduates and professionals, rarely a conversation goes by without the mention of Facebook. This is one technology that has crossed the chasm into the mainstream, developing applications for it is only good business sense.”

Innovation Bay goes socially mobile

This morning was standing room only at Innovation Bay’s December breakfast event.

Click here to listen to Ben Keighran, founder of Bluepulse, wax lyrical about mobile social networking and his insights on Silicon Valley.

[Photo courtesy of Alan Jones. Find more here.]