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.

Aug

25

That Ghost in the Machine

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

There has to be a better way. Seven times have I raced to the telephone today, and seven times have I been greeted with “(pause ..click.) Here is an important message about your insurance/ mis-sold PPI/ tax filing etc etc”. I have put my name on every register but still the intrusive rubbish pours in. My mail box is full of it, and the kindly folk who send us magazines pack a few between every page as well as on them. This dandruff of sales offers is perfectly understandable and indeed some of my best friends, the nicest people you can imagine, make a living out of creating space – filling promotional gunk. And, even worse, many of my clients depend for a revenue stream on selling that space. But I cannot be the only person on the planet who feels exhausted by fending off the intrusive presence of advertising, and feels like saying “When I’m ready to buy, I will give a signal!”

Yesterday I read a fine and stimulating article in the Observor by John Naughton (http://gu.com/p/4by3j), a commentator I much admire and who I have often quoted here. He entitled it: “Is this really the beginning of the end for web ads?” And he cited his use of the Ghostery app to measure the numbers of services watching him using the web in order to find out what he was doing in order to serve him an ad. He counted 31 trackers, and he also quotes a Mozilla engineer as looking at a page served by a well known tech site and finding that the “content” comprised 8k of storage and the ads 6 mb. And we wonder why, in bandwidth starved, fibre-scarce, pseudo-broadband Britain, pages take so long to load! And by now you will be ahead of me, I suspect. Put together the trackers and their bandwidth use, and the ads and theirs, and any school child with a smartphone who wants to get a decent upload time ( – to quote Naughton, we are talking about loading a page to an iPhone in 2 seconds as against eleven at present – ) will load ad-blocking software. Apple, who have no skin in this game, have revised IoS9 and the iPhone release due in the autumn with heavyweight content blocking facilities. They will not be universally effective but think of this: online has the greatest potential for advertising of any medium we have yet acquired for communication purposes. You can track an ad, fit it precisely to your customer’s behaviour, adjust it so readers react to it – and yet advertising in the network has never commanded the rates that it did in the pre-digital world.

So let’s follow the Naughton thesis a little further. Imagine the revolts gain strength. Resentment at the intrusiveness and cost of receiving all those online ads turns into a global movement that blocks them out. Network speeds improve and user costs go down, but that part of publishing that still depends on advertising for a revenue stream takes a further big hit. This will be offset to an extent by Buy Buttons in apps and by brand sponsorship to promote them.

But in a world where users demand free information – and can get it – subscription is not the complete answer in filling the consequent revenue deficit. And providing services, in which information is a part of the deal, is certainly a part of the solution, but how many service vendors do we need? Recent evidence seems to show that users value a dominant incumbent, a challenger and an innovative newcomer – but not much else.

We shall certainly have sponsorship, and that may be a growth point. And it is not hard to imagine the rapid growth of brokerage businesses designed to introduce buyer and seller. I know many in the software sales area, and they infest travel markets. As a general rule the B2B brokers tend to build brand by word of mouth while their consumer equivalents are big brand advertisers – and may be the big brand sponsors of the future. In a world where you buy your Olympic Games coverage from Amazon, watching the Expedia 100m final may make a lot of sense. And Expedia advertising online may not.

This year has seen another new flood of Internet service start-ups. I think we now have to look very carefully at the funding of advertising dependent services in the years to come, and ask where the revenue streams come from in a world where the advertising balloon is deflating. The next DotCom Bust, and we can be sure there will be one, will have The Decline of Advertising running through it like Brighton Rock.

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