zoho notebook...finally real collaboration?

check out the interesting demo of zoho notebook via youtube. while it's hard to get true sense of how easy and useful the application will be for users, it looks pretty slick in the video. to date i haven't seen any of these web-based collaboration tools really get traction, but if there was indeed a place where a group could convene asychronously to collaborate on a project using all different types of media that could open up a whole new dimension on the web.

of course, like most new tech toys, the group that i immediately think of in terms of use case are the younger technofiles. i can already envision my daughter and her friends creating a "notebook" (or better yet a scrapbook) where they chronicle their school days, social lives and maybe even use it to collaborate on a school project once in awhile. (ok, maybe i'm dreaming a bit on this last use case!)

all kidding aside, i can actually see some pretty cool applications for this in the classroom...a way to foster collaboration between students in new learning environments. an approach similar to what Edutopia is focused on.

Picks...Pal and Pop

relatively new consumer internet sites PicksPal and PicksPop (yes, they are part of the same company) are interesting plays in the online gaming genre. i've bounced around a bit on PicksPal, but have had some issues with their site UI...not the most user friendly layout and nav i've seen.

other bit of frustration comes in the fact that once you make a pick you can't trash it and start over...even if the event is several days away.

aside from these minor gripes, these sites take advantage of that primal need in all of us to wager on something...and the nice thing with these two platforms is that there is something to bet on for everyone. needless to say this isn't true 'gambling' in the Vegas way...you wager points and if you pick right you have a chance of winning prizes (some better than others).

as potentially compelling and addictive as PicksPal (and i suppose for some folks PicksPop) may be, they appear to be on that same nomadic journey as several hundred other Web2.0 startups -- the long and windy road to advertising glory. one can only imagine what the company's spreadsheets are telling the VCs who have invested to date...at what point will advertisers start to flock in real numbers? as of today, all that we see are the dreaded house ad.

fresh approach to raising some $$$

what's the counter balance to all the "features" being spun up as "companies"today?...the new approach to venture funding turning up. the "Quick Start" approach by CRV, the roll-out of YCombinator and TechStars, the focus of a shop like First Round Capital, etc.

are all these places are great news for entrepeneurs who have an idea and a couple smart people (preferrably a few of which are good engineers). TechCrunch has post of the basic math for the "Quick Start" program -- only piece that seems like the savvy entrepreneur will still need to negotiate is the "lock up" provision that let's the angel grab a chunk of Series A.

one aspect to consider is the bandwidth these new VC approaches can dedicate to helping nurture their expanding portfolio of small fries. money is money, and even if we're talking loans of just a few hundred grand, it seems as though the guys that get the best ROI out of this approach will be the ones who can help tweak and direct their portfolio companies enough to get them on the right track.

Free music around the corner...

been away for a bit...

nothing jumping out as all that earth shattering here in the New Year...then again, it's almost February so we should assume that the race to be out there with something new and exciting has subsided (at least for Q1).

i did find the NYT piece today about Internet distribution of music sans copyright restrictions to be interesting. actually pretty amazing to think about the short amount of time it has taken to essentially deconstruct the business model with respect to music distribution. i can't help but get a little weepy and overcome with nostaglia everytime i drive by a shuttered TowerRecords storefront.

but then again, i get excited to think about the day when all i have to do to get the music i want is be willing to endure a couple of ads -- either on the site where i download my songs or in a pre-roll audio ad when i fire up my iPod. makes me think that the $4m that Kiptronic raised is actually a pretty good bet given the move to digital music service models have the potential of creating demand for refreshed audio ads hooked in to the music you download for free.

check out Slide...

played around with Slide for first time...still a bit more banging to do on the site, but like the ability to add slideshows to a number of different social networking / blogging sites (like this one!)

but i have to agree with a bunch of the comments on Techcrunch post about Slide questioning the post money valuation on their last round...$60-$80m seems awfully, awfully rich?!!

nonetheless...take a look at the mini slideshow i whipped up below...

netflix vs. blockbuster...latest round

just the tip of the iceberg, but today's Netflix announcement that subscribers will over a phased roll-out be able to stream movies and TV shows via their account is a nice counter-move to blockbuster's recent customer acquisition onslaught (i think i saw the blockbuster vs. netflix comparison ad 50 times in last 2 weeks)

details are a bit sketchy on the economics (techcrunch says netflix is banking $40m to underwrite this), but given the offering is free to subscribers of netflix's dvd subscription service it's clear this is designed to be quite an acquisition tool. if the $40m number is accurate, should be pretty easy to calculate after a year whether the feature draws in new subs and/or helps manage churn of existing user base.

ultimately, what is compelling story here is fact that this represents yet another example where content programmers win by focusing on non-exclusive distribution in digital realm.

Monetize...or die!

sorry for being so draconian, but i can't help getting a little whiff of "1999" around these parts. that's why it is refreshing to see a pretty direct and sobering piece like the one on GigaOM talking about the need for innovation in the area of monetizing social networks.

the opportunity that's out there for startups is to beat Google to the punch in cracking the 'brand advertising' code. quit wasting your time trying to perfect ever more the contextual text link, and get out in front of all those brand dollars rolling out of TV, print and radio to the place where users, segmented nicely in to demographic and -- more importantly -- psychographic niches will serve as the savior for the brand marketer and his/her quest for ROI that doesn't require a click thru rate to calculate.

video/audio messaging via Flikzor

Played around with the new video/audio personal posting site Flikzor.com a little. Still in beta, as is my understanding of what the value proposition and business model is for this cool little application?

Seems like a nice little feature for Myspace.com users and bloggers who are interested in more than just written comments on their blogs.

Nonetheless, I 've have embedded the Flikzor player on my myspace.com page -- will see if it generates any activity on my profile?

CES...where's the beef?

apologies for the delay...been on the road to BCS championship (sorry buckeyes) and then couple days trudging through the smoky casinos of vegas at CES.

wish could say saw something super compelling at the show, but that would only be the case if my last visit to CES had been about 10 years ago. hoping to see a 200 in. plasma screen TV next year! agree with GigaOM post as to five of the more noticeable and meaningful trends at the show. of these, the one that still moves the needle most for me is mobile TV evolution. more i think about the anchor that is the TV in my living room, more i am willing to believe that having access to video (on demand and ultimately live streamed linear programming) is something that users will demand.

i'm also on board with the notion of storage becoming a more meaningful value proposition for users. the tough one here (or i should say the real opportunity) is to be the place where users will be able to easily store and retreive their media...with an emphasis on "easily". i'm not even going to invoke the "mom" test here...how about above-average technical guy me? just give me a simple, intuitive storage option and i'm yours.

yea!...SF wi-fi on the way

Finally, a city that will allow those who want to access the web from somewhere other than a hotel room (or your house if you're not a visitor) the ability to get online...free wi-fi coming to SF! the blurb on Elinor Mills' CNET blog has a link to the detailed agreement between the City and Earthlink.

Think of how great this will be not just adult citizens of SF, but kids in schools around SF -- should make it so much easier for them to hop online in the classroom, library, etc. to enhance their studies. Of course, sure that parents are already fretting as to how to manage it in the home...all the trouble of setting up the old desktop in the kitchen to monitor jr.'s internet usage for waste now that the kid can hop on a laptop and sneak upstairs. Guess time to start investing in "parentware", spyware for parents who want to see where their kids surf!

new telephony service

intrigued by the relatively new and unknown (at least to me?) voice messaging service that Sprint calls "Voice SMS" powered by the company Core Mobility. (check out the full overview on Venture Beat)

i can actually think of a bunch of use cases for this asychronous messaging tool -- beyond of course the one of me in a car trying to type a message on my blackberry! unfortunately for society, email has i think turned the business community in to a bunch of "asynchronous" messaging addicts. think about how much time you spend just trying to keep up with email...and how much of that email is innane drivel?

sadly, the Vnotes product from Core Mobility smacks of just another way we can send a message without having to actually talk to another person. in fact, i envision a Hollywood script in my future about the business guy who only communicated with the world via email, IM and Vnotes. oh the bliss.

it's a p2p world (at least in 2007)

Intriguing list of predictions for 2007 laid out on Newteevee. Perhaps I like it given my bias towards the emphasis on the power of p2p distribution for video content.

Feels like 2007 will be year of continued standoff between p2p guys and content developers...with the battles won as always by the leverage points (read: you got good content people want, you got leverage...you got content that needs exposure you ain't got so much leverage).

And let's not minimize the powerful potential benefits for anyone in the biz that comes from declining bandwidth costs...the more the distribution economics of web mirror those of TV the more incentive to get video content in the cloud.

web OS...not so fast

So word on the street (not Wall Street, just your neighborhood street I suppose) that Vista will be the last major release of Windows...or least so says Gartner. Now I don't think anyone disputes the power of open source and fact that the browser increasingly will become the UI that users deal with when they're not in front of their TV sets (that's a whole separate topic).

But if my experience playing a math learning video game with my daughter is any indication, we've got a ways to go before we'll be ready to have everything live on the grid. People -- not just 7 year old girls -- have very little patience...and each time the video game hit a stall point and the little rainbow spinner on my Mac fired up I could see my little girl's shoulders drop in the agony of having her experience disrupted.

Now I know this was part software issue and part computer processing issue (though for some crazy reason I expected the latter to not be a problem since afterall I'm on a Mac?), but moving everything to a "Web based" OS where my browser sits on top of every application just shifts the bottlenecks over to other folks like my friendly ISP for example (net neutrality anyone?).

So before we get too excited about a new world OS -- just visualize your kid, mom, wife, etc. frustrated when they have to wait for something to load or work on their computer and remember that that experience isn't going away anytime soon.

community still all the rage?

Pretty interesting post on Community over at VentureBeat by Noah Kagan. Not exactly sure that the business models outlined in the comments section below the post really amount to anything, but do agree that still plenty of room to roll out ever specialized communities that are relevant to people (like my pal is doing at Daily Strength).

and away we go...and valuing a start-up

This morning I had the rare opportunity (hopefully more frequent in 2007) to grab a copy of the NYTimes. And I had the even rarer opportunity to actually read a few articles. The piece by Mark Hulbert "A New Way to Guage a Start-up's Worth", presents an interesting alternative to traditional start-up valuation methods (e.g. industry comps, DCF, revenue/earnings multiples). Of course it would be required to read the book by the Wharton professor cited in the article for coming up with the new method to fully assess the method, but the two core assumptions (revenue growth compared to industry comps and revenue growth compared to industry average post IPO) seem to leave a lot of wiggle room in the method. For a lot of internet start-ups, the definition of "industry" is a real challenge, not to mention the fact that even if a clear industry category is defined, isn't it often the case that only a couple rise to the level that yield an IPO that would serve as the basis for what appears to be much of this valuation method's approach?

Nonetheless, as with any valuation exercise, there's the quantitative and the qualitative...if anything, this method appears to fit on the list of both such valuation categories.