Posted: February 7th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts, Fun, Startups | Tags: Business, Business plan, Education, Entrepreneurs, Fun, Interesting, Internet, Money, Social Network, Startups | No Comments »
Kwedit is a strange name for a payment company. This is a startup that offers a new form of payment to social and interactive games that allows people to buy virtual goods. The strange thing is that it allows people to “promise” to pay for a virtual good and the user can pay the promise later with a bar code in a 7eleven store.
Even though this seems to be a great innovation, the idea of printing a bar code and pay it in a retail store is nothing new to date. The strong differentiator of Kwedit is the idea of promising to pay later. I wonder what would happen if everybody promises to pay but none of the actually pays anything. I believe that the CFO of the company would be scare of the increase in the account payable of the balance sheet.
This type of payment for virtual goods reminded me of Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a Finnish company that started its virtual goods operations before the internet boom. It is probably the first company to have a business model based on selling virtual goodies to users. Interesting enough, Habbo targeted in a very narrow market segment. Its targets on teenagers that love to chat in pixel-lated environment.
Habbo and its many forms of payments.
Habbo offers 7eleven payments too. OK, they sell pre-paid cards and Kwedit doesn’t.
In my humble opinion, Sulake could have grown much more if it had focused on the virtual good market as a whole market instead of just that niche teenager segment. It could have created a strategic plan of reaching all types of games and services based on virtual goods. Well, other companies grew upon this model and they are newer than Habbo. C’est tant pis.
Posted: January 3rd, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | Tags: Articles, Education, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | No Comments »
This is very helpful for my New Venture Project timeline.
Quick summary:
- Trying to raise money too late
- Trying to raise money too early
- Lacking a realistic assessment of the companys’ value
- Not building enough substance before approaching investors
- Not splitting the message into smaller chunks
- Preparing poor pitch material
- Pitching to the wrong investors
- Not pitching at all
- Getting too greedy
- Not willing to share risk
Read the whole post at Arctic Startup via 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital.
Posted: December 14th, 2009 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Venture Capital | Tags: Education, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Valuation, Venture Capital | No Comments »
I read a very interesting article about HR Acquisition from “A VC” blog. It shows what a HR Acquisition is and how to calculate the acquisition of a target company in simple financial model. A must read for people who want to work in the VC world.
From A VC
via The HR Acquisition.
Posted: December 13th, 2009 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Readings, Web 2.0 | Tags: Articles, Education, Food for thoughts, Google, Interesting, Internet, News, Trends, Web | No Comments »
Times Skimmer
I was reading this news Google Faces A Different World in Italy from the New York Times and it is about Google’s criminal charges related to privacy in Italy. A senior executive in Italy may get to jail because of an outcry over an online video involving an autistic boy.
The implication if Google loses is that opens the discussion of who should be liable for information in the internet platforms, such as YouTube and even Google Search, in Europe. In the US, most of this discussions were solved by the Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act that creates a safe harbor for online service providers. Basically, people can only sue internet companies if it’s proven that the company hasn’t done anything to stop the offence (copyright or other legal offences). I’m impressed that Europe does not have such laws protecting online service providers yet.
It reminds me of a similar situation when the Google Brasil’s managing director was being held accountable for pedophile pictures on Orkut. Google Brasil and US created huge task-force to curb the infestation of that problem with people and new tools for the federal police. The initiative went really well and the government abandoned the charges. However, there is still no laws defining clearly what the responsibilities are for online service providers regarding about illegal or offensive material in their websites in Brazil.
I’m worried if governments start demanding companies to act as a censor for information flow. The cornerstone of Internet as we know is sharing information. When companies and government start blocking access to information, the internet will not be the same. Consequently, the way we use and do business on the Internet may also change.
