Nov

15

StartUp and MidTerm investor Heaven

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Yes, it was the sixth Noah show in London on Thursday and Friday last week. The poet may have referred to them as “brokers roaring like beasts on the floor of the borse”, but seeing Europe’s investment bankers, VCs and PE funds filling three floors of Old Billingsgate (surely over 2000 this year) was a joyous sight. These people clearly love Noah, and the way they tolerate two days of constant bombardment is testimony to this: they eat and drink and meet and… roar at each other all day long and go to the Noah party at night, but from 8.30 am to 7.30 pm they absorb some 200 presentations on three stages in a positive orgy of claim, comparison, analysis and counter-argument. Presiding over this like a genial Godfather is Marco Rodzynek, and having attended these shows since the first in 2009 in the Hilton, Park Lane – only 100 or so people but the catering was excellent – I feel, from a TMT perspective, that it was almost worth Lehmann going down to get this show started in the sector.

Of course, much has changed. Huge global volumes of devices and users have altered the meaning of our early definitions of proof of concept and usage as a measure of success. You can now have sector and geography specific plays that command larger audiences than the global marketplace in 2009. NOAH covers Europe, with a strong flavour of the stand-out start-up cities – London, Berlin and Barcelona, as well as a useful input from the influential Israeli industry. There is also a NOAH event now in Berlin and I shall hope to cover that in 2016. These events are simply the best way I know of touching the pulsating heart of innovation in Europe, at all the stages covered from start-up to near-mature businesses looking for the next investor. Because there is always a next investment stage, and NOAH, as leading advisers in the sector, are crucially aware of the work-in-progress aspect.

I could generalize about innovation for the rest of this blog, but it may be best to give you a flavour from some extracts from my notes. Bear in mind that these come from a few hours on one day on one stage: I would hesitate before trying your patience with the full output!

….

Inquisitr Every service vendor now has a news service, from Google to Facebook Notify. This is a response to these new ways of presenting breaking news. Requirements – speed, luck and authority!…..
Mubi Quality -based video streaming. Began on PlayStation in 2007. Now in a JV with Sony delivering quality movies to PlayStation. Founder says it took 149,000 nights to become an overnight success!….
TeamViewer. Fremium model in which private viewers go free and corporate viewers (now integrated into Outlook) pay. Remote support software aimed at remote access, monitoring and sharing services. 1 billion installations, 20 million online at any one time, 200m corporate customers, 300 million accounts, 30 languages. Customer range – from a hospital group sharing images to an artist mounting a global exhibition of his work….
Pipedrive (a NOAH investment) CRM for SMEs. “aimed at the salesman and built for mobile use”. “42% of CRM software is never used” Gartner. Developed for people who never had CRM before. Estonia, and now US….
Scyti Barcelona-based global supplier of election software. 42 countries Online voting platform with 24 solutions ranging from registration to results tallying. Security is key element. Market worth $500m Has done 4 rounds of VC investment, raised $100m last time…
Deezer streaming music 6 m customers. 35 m tracks. Subscription model. Big business in cars. Some ads but subs is future 2007. Collects 240 m data points from customers daily. Sends lyrics. Download is dying, discs are dying…
SimilarWeb. Visitors and performance of every web service. Rank. Like Nielsen for websites .Not downloads but usage. Alexa but better and global. Multi source data…
Statista. Largest market research portal 20 m Rev 35% margin. Market research bigger usage than Nielsen, lpsos. Info graphics is marketing device….
Mall of Africa. ECommerce goods for aspirational markets. Address verification. 300 m middle class internet users on mobile. Amongst 1.2 bn people. Nigeria and Kenya as hubs… MoovIT, 90min. Israel
(soccer, user created)….
Badoo Largest dating social media? 270m registered users generating 40m messages a month. Transition from web to mobile. Founded 2007, profitable 2009…

Just a flavour, but also i hope an indication of why this is so fascinating, and why the wide differences between different styles of venturing , and widely different results in different geographies makes this important, not just for investors, but for everyone of us as creators of network – based services of some sort or another.

May

12

The Deniability of the Blog

Filed Under Blog, eLearning, healthcare, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Back in Germany after a weekend, I find that everything has changed. I am in Gendarmenmarkt and not in Ku’damm, and we are celebrating an end to war on all sides. And I am at the wonderful Fiesole Retreat, out in full strength to once more bring STM publishers, librarians and academics together in a conference small enough for meaningful dialogue, and sufficiently heterodox to throw up thinking that skews the accepted beliefs. In its fifteenth year, it remains a huge credit to its founders, Casalini Libri, to whose bosom it returns next year in Fiesole, and the Charleston conference. This year, in Berlin with the support of the Humboldt University, Walter de Gruyter and Springer, was well up to the high standards of the series.

The speaker of the event, for me, was Anya Smit, the challenging university librarian from Utrecht. Designing a library which will soon be an entirely digital concept, she and her colleagues set aside the format limitations of “book”, or rather reconstruct them so that a blog becomes a “book”. I loved the openness of her approach and her disdain for limitations as to what a library might contain and how it’s knowledge exploration might be bounded. We had, after all, started the meeting quite conventionally with Michael Mabe, in non-confrontational mode, giving a fascinating account of the history of the journal and the article from Henry Oldenburg onwards to celebrate the foundation of the Royal Society Transactions in 1665. In many ways this made an admirable book-end to Anya Smit’s talk, illustrating how completely we have removed ourselves from the age of format and how completely the chain of scholarly communication in a digitally networked world values contributions by impact and timing, and not by process and format.

In many ways Deni Auclair of Outsell hammered this home when she gave a complete analysis of how the STM marketplace is behaving. I am still slightly alarmed by the fact that there is a $10 billion gap between Outsell’s estimated market sizing and the $25 billion revenue base claimed by the STM association of publishers. There is of course bound to be a difference between a measurement of publishing revenues and the information actually bought by customers, given that data sales are so important to research and will arguably become more important. Will we see the journal market continue to grow but diminish in overall terms as a proportion of what it’s market actually buys? And will this be exacerbated by the impact of Open Access? Deni pointed to the relative lack of impact of OA on publisher revenues, less than 1% of which were derived from author publication fees. Given that publishers were the recipients of prophecies of doom and extinction from OA fundamentalists like Professor Stevan Harnad some years back , I had the temerity to tweet this at #fiesoleretreat15, wondering if that great warrior was prepared to acknowledge predictions unmet. I had the reply immediately: “umm, where did I predict OA by (any date)?-Did say it could be provided overnight, was greatly overdue, optimal, and inevitable”. Which demonstrates both the glories of the global conferencing of Twitter and my need to apologise to the Professor. I clearly misunderstood him to mean that it was coming before it was overtaken by other inevitabilities like the death of the journal, the end of the article and the decay of peer review!

The polar opposite of the feisty Professor might well be Derk Haank, now CEO of Springer, who gave the evening session at the conference. Bursting with energy and confidence after launching the new name of the merged company earlier in the day (apparently it could not have been Nature-Springer since the resulting initials would have been unacceptable in Germany!), he roundly declared that the tasks ahead were nothing for a team which had made Elsevier likeable to the academic community. And even more gratifying was his promise, addressed directly to this blogger over the heads of his audience, that he was not going to retire any time soon, and certainly not when the IPO of Springer-Nature takes place.

Now did I ever say that? Or is it subject to the retrospective Harnad rules of recall? For all I know I wrote a blog on the Bush-Blair initiative in Iraq as a humanitarian gesture, or one on How Labour really won the 2015 UK election. Historians in the archives of the Utrecht university library will have to sort it out. My hope is that neither Professor Harnad or Derk Haank retire. They are far too entertaining in a grey world to be spared but if they could be persuaded to do an Open Access start-up together….

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