The smartphone industry is moving to follow the same path of the personal computer (PC). Both industries have a lot of manufacturers. For example, Dell for computers and Motorola for smartphone. PC and smartphones have operating systems. For PC, the major OS is Windows and for smartphone, there are more than one major operating system. There are iPhone OS, Blackberry and Android (Google). It seems that there is a platform war among the manufacturers and Google. Imagine that a company can implement a system that is used by most of the cellphone manufacturers. This company will be able to control the smartphone industry, just as Microsoft controls the PC industry.

Nexus One Homepage

Google launched its official cellphone with Android operating system today. It is entering the smartphone market by providing a free OS to cellphone and aligning with manufacturer to provide a better user experience through better applications and superior hardware.

Google may reach a dominance in the smartphone market if it can have more manufacturers using its OS. However, manufacturers are not going to rely 100% in one software company. At the same time, most industry players do not have core competency in software development, thus they may rely on Google Android this time.

Meanwhile, iPhone is growing and Blackberry is responding to the new threats in the market. Nokia and other cellphones company are losing ground. It is an interesting time for this fast changing industry.

My 2 cents.

It is so hard to come up with a nice name for startup or new blog when most of the basic names are all registered. Then, most people come up with strange or too creative names to their website which are hard to search. But imagine that you can search for domain names with prefix and suffix easily and Nomaine can provide that type of domain name search. I will use this tool and some others (Google Insight for Search) for domain name registration.

http://nomaine.com/

Bookhu is a book review website that shows if a book is read more by men or women. It is a food for thought website. It shows if I have more male or female preference. In my searches, most of my books related to entrepreneurship, venture capital and languages are read more by men. However, my books related to culture are read more by women.

http://penzu.com/

This is strange. A Canadian company created a blog system that provides private blog posts as a default choice. This means that users of this blog system will create their blog post privately and not sharing to other people. This defeats the notion of blog because blog’s main objective is to share and not to hide. Also, WordPress and even Blogger provide privacy settings that block the public access to blogs or specific blog posts. So, there should be no need to create a service specific for that. Maybe, this is an indication of asymmetric information.

http://sprouter.com/

Sprouter is a social network that connects entrepreneurs around the world. It is one of those website for grass-rooting campaigns for entrepreneurs to share their ideas. I’m not sure if that’s effective given that there are many social network dedicated to the same thing.

http://tinychat.com/

Tinychat provides free video and audio chatroom for the mass. People can use this tool as a DJ room, virtual meeting presentation room or live interactive TV. I like this website because it’s free and for startups, this tool can connect our team member even if they are in different parts of the world. I think this is a Webex competitor only that Webex is focused on corporate customers and Tinychat is focused on the consumer customers.

If this service catches on, it would be a great acquisition target for big companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft and even Yahoo. I believe that with the adoption of higher speed internet network and the integration of video and audio into gadgets, the reality is that people will prefer to use video and audio to communicate rather than writing, SMS or IM.

InterClick is a company that provides traditional approach of supply chain methodology into optimization of ROI over advertising spending. I’m writing this post because I’m so impress that the market has so much appetite for advertising systems and tools and ad networks.

Traditional approach to online marketing

Basically, it treats publishers and ad inventory from ad networks as suppliers and the demand is generated from advertisers’ needs. interClick than provides a system that control, monitor, and optimize the ad spending.

It raised $18 million! It is not clear how different this system is from other well established players, such as Doubleclick, Atlas, etc. Most of this one-stop platform monitoring systems are also ad servers. The integration of ad server is an important technical aspect of the monitoring and optimization process of online marketing campaign.

The ad server provides the user, ad and result tracking. It tells us about where the ad was clicked and if that ad generated a sales or not. Most monitoring systems use those data and provides meaningful reports and some of them provide tools to manage campaigns more effective.

I’m not sure how if there’s a space for one more player.

InterClick Website

From Silicon Alley Insider:

via Nasdaq’s Only “Pure-Play” Ad Network Raises $18.1 Million (ICLK).

I am very impressed and glad by the speed that Stribe has replied to my post. A good entrepreneur should be able to react to the current dynamics of how people comment and make opinions about his product. A fast reply like that is a plus. He got me from this positive attitude.

I registered for the beta and I will check it out and compare with other similar tools from the web. I will update my findings in another blog post once I tested them all.

Below is the reply from Kamel, the CEO of Stribe.

———————————————————–

Hello Chim Kan,

Thanks for sharing. it’s very interesting to have your point of view. I am going to try to show you the key differences between Stribe, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect :
- Stribe is an embeddable White Social Network. That means the social network can be fully branded with look & feel of the website;
- Stribe is a B to B service. The ownership of data and content generated by the users of the community is the ownership of the “Stribed” website.
- Stribe provides the analytic of the social activity of the community to let the website drives and understand their members online;
-There is no downloading neither technical requirement to stribe a website. Indeed, you just a Javascript code let you embed a Stribe Social Network. All Internet users will be able to see/join/share with your community IN your website without downloading anything.

Finally, the speed of the website is not impacted by the Stribe Social Network because it is loaded only if the end-user want to interact or engage with the community.

What do you think about these explanations? it is helpful to better undersdand our value proposition?
Feel free to contact me to move forward.

Thanks again for sharing.

All the Best,

Kamel
@stribe

——————————————————————————–

I was using Hunch this weekend to see how it works. It is a quiz guessing website. You make questions and it gives you its hunch about what the best thing is for you.

I chose the What’s the best profession for me quiz. It started showing me the following questions:

And I’ve got the results here.

After having to explain to my friends so many times about what a venture capital firm does, I created a simple and quick way to segment different kinds of VC firms.

Basically, we can classify venture capital firms with 3 criteria: industry target, fund’s size and preferred investment stage.

Most of the VC firms are specialized in a set of industries. Some firms are dedicated into internet startups such as Brightspark and some others that invest in proven general technology companies such as EdgeStone. Usually, VC firms specialize in specific sectors because they can build a strong knowledge of an industry and they can spot good opportunities and support portfolio firms easily.

Size of a fund is an important metric to classify VC firms. VC firms make money in two main ways: management fees and carried interests. The bigger the fund’s size, the bigger the reward for a VC firm. Also, for entrepreneurs, the fund’s size is a good indication of the amount of money the firm is able to invest. If an entrepreneur has a project that needs $10M, so an ideal VC firm would have a fund with over $100M (I will explain the rationale for this later in other posts).

Then, different firms have different investment strategy. Usually (though not a rule), small VC firms tend to invest in seed stage companies and bigger firms invest in growing and pre-IPO companies. If I were an internet entrepreneur and I don’t need that much money, I would go for a VC firms that specializes in seed stage internet company with a fund size under $ 100M.

This framework is important for entrepreneurs. Knowing how to differentiate VC firms can show readiness to a venture capitalist and you can easily explain why you are approaching that VC firm instead of the other.

I’m glad that I’m resuming my VC posts!

Happy Faces - I'm resuming my VC posts

Negotiation - Time, Information and Power

There are three main variables in negotiation: time, information and power.

Time is important because the lack of it can cause great damage for the person or organization.

Imagine that two venture capital firms have a great interest in a startup company. They know that one of them will close a deal tomorrow. So, the most important factor in the negotiation is time. Who is going to have more time to think and negotiate?

Information is important when it can greatly affect the value or the conditions of the deal.

Let’s think that a biotechnology startup has a phase IV (read more about clinical trial) drug waiting for approval. A private equity firm is very interested in the company. It knows that if the company succeeds in the trial, the valuation of the company will be astronomical and it will not be able to get a good deal with the company. However, if the drug does not pass the trial, the startup will not have great value at all.

In this case, information is extremely important for the negotiation.

Lastly, power is also extremely important. Usually, one side has more resources and it will use this in the bargaining process.

A very typical example of today, MBA students graduate and can’t find jobs. Those who get offer do not have power to negotiate better salary and bonus because the company has the money and has the power to hire someone or not.

Risk is a tool in negotiation that can help you to take advantange from the other side of the table. It depends on two factors:

- Circumstances

- Risk attitude from the negotiator

Risk can be used to ask for bold concession from your partner. However, if the negotiator is risk-aversed, the chance is that the other side will take advantage and try to ask for more concession by aggressive moves.

David Seah is a functional designer creating very interesting calendar such as the Compact Calendar 2009. It allows you to make a big picture plan of what the most important days are and what you have to do on those days.

Official Compact Calendar Page

Check it out and create your on calendar now: http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar

Another great tool from Google: Google News Timeline.

Google News Timeline - Venture Capital results from 2001

It shows all the news that you search in a timeline! You can see the news in a more coherent way. It is much easier to build stories and check for historical patterns.

Before moving to my comparison of Internet Burst news and the current crisis, let me ask you when these headlines were written (don’t read them yet)?

Venture Capital On The Rocks

Venture Capital Firms Face Stricter Regulations

Venture capital harder to find for companies in search of funding sources

Venture capital investments plunge 23%

Boston-Area Venture Capital Firm Slashes Investment Fund by 63 Percent

Attempts to Find Capital Frustrates Toledo, Ohio, Wireless Internet Founders

Venture Capital: Cautious VCs again looking at incubation

Second-Quarter Chill Continues for Venture Capital

Venture capital downturn worsens

Guess what? All these news were written in 2002! They are very similar to the news that we have about the venture capital industry today as you can compare here:

Venture capital slashed $476 million in quarter

Is Venture Capital in Trouble?

Venture capital performance among worst in a decade

College Endowments Deserting Venture Capital

Bleak outlook for venture capital as Silicon Valley tries hand at self-funding

National Venture Capital Association predicts investment slowdown into 2009

Venture capital industry squeezed

Venture capital-backed IPOs hit 30-year low in 2008

Venture Funding in First Quarter Drops 50 Percent

As you can see, it looks that the news are very similar between 2002 and 2009. Who knows if we may have a similar downturn period of two years as you can see below.

Internet Boom Burst

The bad news started to pop up from April 2002, with the news: Venture capital harder to find for companies in search of funding sources, until February 2004, with the news: Technology Venture Capital Fund-Raising Accelerates.

2 years of VC industry downturn.

Current Crisis

It started from October 2008, with: The Tech Sector’s Venture Capital Is Drying Up, and it continues with today’s: Venture Funding in First Quarter Drops 50 Percent.

Seven months of VC industry downturn.

If this pattern happens again, we may still have to wait 17 months before any big good news! It will be the time of my MBA graduation.

This is an impressive beta tool from Google: Similar Images.

As you can see, I’m searching for Sao Paulo’s images in the tool.

Google Similar Images - Sao Paulo

Then, I select one of the picture to get similar images and the tool gives back a list of images related to what I was looking for!

Similar Images results for Sao Paulo

Impressive!

Some newspaper and some people believe that more people are looking for entrepreneurship to solve their unemployment or lay off issues, however it is not what is happening if we check Google’s Insight For Search tool.

The tool allows us to see the search behaviour on the internet.

If more people are searching for X, X graph will grow. Interpretation in general is simple in that tool.

I’m going to use the tool to see if people are searching more for entrepreneurship or something else because of unemployment.

A lot of people are searching for unemployment and not MBA or GMAT

Chim’s comment: you can see that there was a surge on the search of “unemployment” query. It is easy to understand why people are searching for unemployment if companies are laying off. But, as you can see, there was no increase search in GMAT or MBA! Their searches are flat as usual.

If we add entrepreneur or venture capital, unemployment is still a big search anyway.

Chim’s comment: People are neither caring for MBA, GMAT, Entrepreneurship nor Venture Capital. You will see at the end of this post what matters to most people regarding about unemployment.

When school starts or after people had their vacation, everyone looks to open their own business until xmas, when they forget.

Chim’s comment: I highlighted the seasonality grow of searches like entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs (actually, people search more for entrepreneur (sans ‘s’). Also, nobody wants to talk about venture capital or entrepreneurs during xmas.

Nobody cares about VC or Entrepreneurs but unemployment

Chim’s comment: Again, people are neither caring for Entrepreneurship nor Venture Capital. What really matter is:

Unemployment Benefits!

People wants to look for unemployment benefits, then once they realize what they are entitled for, they want to go to the unemployment office. Isn’t it great? Nobody looks for entrepreneurship or MBA to solve their job loss issue!

Flip your words

This is a fun tool that flips and invert the words that you type.

Take this example:

I love venture capital and entrepreneurship. I also love Google too.

Using this tool, I get:

˙ooʇ ǝlƃooƃ ǝʌol oslɐ ı ˙dıɥsɹnǝuǝɹdǝɹʇuǝ puɐ lɐʇıdɐɔ ǝɹnʇuǝʌ ǝʌol ı

It was a success in my facebook.

Check out for this tool at http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

Ning

Ning is a kind of more evoled Yahoo or Google groups. It says that it is a new way to build your own social network site, but I see it as a normal discussion group with up-to-date web 2.0 resources and tools.

Highrise is my new adopted contact manager and personal CRM! It is a great tool to get myself organized about personal tasks with other people and an awesome tool for keeping track of my networking activities.

Balsamiq Mockups Intro

Hey,

I usually do not promote things (except for exceptional and high-productivity products or tools). I’ve just found out an interesting software that allows us to create a product layout in a couple of minutes.

It is a software called Balsamiq and it is a very very easy to use. Check the video next to this post to see it in action!

What you can do with it:

- Really fast prototyping.
- Create mocks for Websites or desktop softwares.
- Create GUI and interface that suits your project needs.
- Share and export easily to your team members.
- Type to find interfaces to your mockups

Go to there website to find out more: http://balsamiq.com

Pixlr.com - Online Image Editing Tool

It is an online image editing software. If you are in somewhere with no image editor program, you can go to Pixlr.com upload your image that you want to edit and change it.

The site is really quick and it comes in many languages. Also, it is very easy to use. I’m impressed. I thought that it was not possible to have a kind of online Photoshop but I’m wrong.