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.

Jun

30

When Culture eats Strategy…

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

The wise man at the head of the table in a meeting last week reminded me of this old saw. And quite rightly we were discussing academic publishing at the time. And the words came back to me when I saw last week that Springer had acquired the Max Planck Living Review journals and that Maney, with its considerable position in the important Materials Science sector, had sold out to Taylor and Francis. The pressure to consolidate drives both these deals. Both of these large acquirers can use their scale in terms of production and distribution to improve margins here, and manifestly there are not that many interesting acquisition opportunities around. Yet both of these deals display very different characteristics. In my view, it is hugely encouraging to see Taylor and Francis, enjoying the confidence of their new management at the Informa level, investing again in content that they have probably been eyeing for a decade. Cash cows need to be fed and watered like other assets. Yet the age of the quick add-on acquisition are drawing to a close. The major players must look to organic growth, to developing the service cultures that will give them prime sectoral positions with researchers, rather than seeking ever greater volume to thrust into diminishing library budgets.

Viewed from this angle, the Springer deal is the more innovative. Maney was descended from a printer who had moved logically into intellectual property ownership. Living Reviews is based on a research institute making the same move. But there the similarities end, because Living Reviews signals yet another move away from the traditional formats of publishing. The whole idea of having a review article which can be perpetually update and change to reflect changing trends, and always be up to date when you view it, represents a data challenge and an editorial challenge. For Springer to even think of it demands a data environment that allows for rapid new development – an agile publishing environment. The major step taken by Springer to revitalize SpringerLink by recreating it on a MarkLogic platform, is critical to the organic growth strategy because it allows all of the data to be available all of the time for new product development.

We do not know yet whether the Max Planck philosophy of continually evolving review articles will succeed in other disciplines outside of physics, but if it does it will provide a dynamic growth point, and one capable of very high impact factors as theses present “living” reviews have demonstrated in their 15 year history. But what does this imply for the researcher/author – publisher relationship? And what for the idea of the Article and the Journal? In a discussion recently I was very struck by my interlocutor referring to the “Plos 1 journal”. In any sensible world we would by now have cast out the word “journal” and referred to Plos 1 as a database. The only likeness shared by these data elements is that they passed a test of competence in scientific method and procedure. Not only are they not a journal but very many of our never-printed, never-shelved so-called journals should not be referred to using that term. And when, almost two decades ago, I wrote that the Article and not the journal was the true unit of currency in scholarly communication, I was trying to express then the need to re-invent as we move away from any sense of being rooted in a prior print world. So Living Review articles are not articles as print would know them, bounded by time. They are articles as Wikipedia would know them, and we cannot afford to let our old print culture devour our new researcher-facing strategies. But the small sample of interested parties I spoke to last week were less impressed that the Springer acquisition is Open Access and much more interested in talking about speed of update and publication. Funny, that, after all the outrage of the 1990s at slothful publishing producing the goods too slowly, publishing is now much quicker – but, in a network age, still too slow.

So to me the lesson is clear. When we get into the room we use to plan the future, we need to leave the heritage terminology outside of the door. Lets concentrate on researchers and their workflow, and then on how we can improve performance. Mendeley and ReadCube (which notched up another useful win last week) have probably done more in the past five years to make the world of science findable and manageable than anything else. If the future lies in self-publishing with institutional repositories then where is your figshare? Or its successor? The future is not a game that everyone can play, and being Big, while it helps, is not the decisive advantage that it once was. You do really need to have the right culture in order to get into the strategy room in the right frame of mind, and get out with the two vital components – a component of tomorrow and a glimpse of the horizon.

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