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For 21C Malone, #whatsnext?

2011-09-16T05:08:00.000+01:00

So the news is out about John, Andy and Betaworks and you know it's real inside baseball when its number 1 on Hacker News :)

These guys are two of the people I've worked most closely with in the last few years and some of my favourite people in the industry and now they will be playing in different bands. It seems like much of the focus so far, has been on Andy going to USV but given I've know John for much longer, I thought I'd give my two cents on that part of the journey.

I think I first met John or as he’s now know - @borthwick - in 1996 in a tiny office in Cambridge, MA. We were talking about how Firefly and TotalNewYork could work together. He was building the bones of a distributed network of local content sites and we were building (I think!) a distributed identity network to personalize web applications.

We must have clicked, because this was the first of many conversations on pretty much the same theme we had in many different guises over the next 16 years.

While John stayed East and sold his company to AOL, where he worked with Ted Leonsis to buy and build out communications and media services like ICQ, WinAmp, Spinner and AOL Greenhouse, the Firefly team went West. We were locked up in the ivory towers of Redmond for two years trying to build out an identity based web platform (Passport), which core communications services (Hotmail and Messenger) could plug into as well as any apps Microsoft were building (Expedia, Sidewalk, Finance etc). We really wanted to work with John and AOL to federate the network, but we were Explorer and soon John became Netscape - any shared vision we had of what data driven web might look like went by the wayside.

When I left Seattle in 1999 and moved to New York to work on accelerator 1.0 with my partner Upendra (who went on to work with John at AOLTW) - the first crew we reconnected with and sought out were John, Scott Heiferman, Seth Goldstein, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky.

This was (is) an amazing group - in fact its always a touch awesome to see what they’ve all done in the last 10 years, but John was always a little different. Entrepreneurial - check. Big thinker - check. Great seed investor - check (will also be thankful for John’s intro to Pyra Labs). Working in a nimble start-up environment - NFW!

Either John was in training to be Rupert Murdoch or John Malone, or he was mad. While the rest of us were dabbling in startups, he was fully embedded inside an AOL which was uncomfortably merging with Time Warner and getting pretty good at playing macro-political chess with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and News Corp. (I had a brief window into this when I was at Skype talking with John about how we could work with AIM).

In fact what I think he was doing, was trying to see how far you could push the innovation model inside a huge company. He wanted to see whether you could actually leverage this amazing set of assets to do something transformational. He and his little team of rockstars (including my now friends Carter and Josh) were figuring out if they could build a platform with the same principles of federated identity we’d discussed 6 years before in Cambridge to deliver personalized, interactive applications which could leverage the awesome distribution power of wires (ISP and cable), the social distribution power of contacts (AIM and ICQ) and combine it all with the greatest content kingdom on the planet (Warner, HBO and Time). Why not? It had to be worth a shot, in fact I was momentarily tempted to join him on this crazy mission!

But all good things come to an end - we knew that in the end, John would get frustrated and take the leap full time to start-up land. So in around 2007 after John had helped Scott Heiferman sell Fotolog and left Time Warner, he took a break with his family and passed through London. I was leaving Skype and about to focus more on investing with TAG and Index - so again we talked about #whatsnext.

We discussed the low cost of company building; we talked about new investment models; but as always, we drifted back to platforms and the components you would need for building and testing applications. John energized me to develop the Seedcamp idea, inspired by what Paul Grahams was doing at YCombinator and I listened as he outlined his first drafts of what would become the first few chapters of Betaworks.

I remember my first experience of John’s Betaworks vision. I think it was his first Betaday. There must have been around 25 people: Scott Heiferman talking about his amazing Meetup.com and building businesses which lasted decades (this was the business in 2002 gave me my faith back in the web), folks like David Karp (just starting) and hackers fresh out of YC roaming around. But the stand out for me was an amazing guy who John knew from AOL and Wesleyan (his college) - Andy Weissman - who was thinking about the next version of venture. As usual with John this was a loosely federated network, but he clearly knew which way it was going and although his foresight on Tumblr was not clear to me then (more fool me!), Andy was an obvious gem.

In a way Betaworks gave me my first real opportunity to work with John on a regular basis and my first ever occasion to work with Andy. Between TAG and Betaworks we ended up doing a lot together. We co-invested in Daylife, Songkick, Snaptalent and Tipjoy. We backed Betaworks projects like Bitly and with Index, Chartbeat. But where we definitely had the most fun (and arguments!) was in building companies together with Iain at TweetDeck and Mario at Twitterfeed. One of the most energizing few days I’ve had in years was when John was talking to me about us working with him and Iain at TweetDeck - rolling through our lessons from the browser-wars and plotting how to make clients more social and sticky.

This is a really exciting new chapter and the timing is typically spot on, because in the last 4 years Andy and John in startup parlance have “killed it”: Summize, TweetDeck, SocialFlow, Bitly, Chartbeat and on. They are at the top of their game. They have turned whiteboard sketches into products; products into businesses and invested in some of the hottest startups (Tumblr, GroupMe, Kickstarter) in the last 5 years - all the time helping to re-energize the NYC startup scene, creating an amazing space to work, be a landing pad for Seedcamp and generally just being great people.

I have to say, one of my great professional guilty pleasures in the last 4 years has been getting to know and work with Andy. He’s just a total pleasure: smart, laid back, totally passionate, seriously into his music and although he comes across as the most amiable, reasonable New Yorker you will ever meet, the man is no pushover. I am thrilled for him, Fred, Albert and Brad - what a quartet that will be, we've already done a lot together with USV and I can’t wait with Andy on board to do even more with all of them.

For John, the big question is always #whatsnext?

I’d say that the rehearsals at TotalNewYork, AOL and Time Warner will end up leading to a very interesting performance. As the media industry deconstructs, new entities will emerge and take the place of the old ones. Yahoo and other first generation web media companies are withering before our eyes. But if the future of media continues to riff around the combination of big data, social distribution and light-weight applications, my sense is that the brand, skills, assets and capital base that John has bootstrapped at Betaworks sets him up pretty well to figure out what the Malone or Murdoch of the 21st century looks like.

Is it possible that from a small agile company that both builds and invests, a digitally native Liberty Media could emerge? That’s the bet that I think John is taking. I really hope I still get to take part in the next 16 years of the conversation, its for sure going to be an interesting ride :)

Some highlights from Seedcamp Week 2011

2011-09-13T07:05:00.000+01:00

The team of Reshma, Carlos, Phil and Kirsen did an amazing job - and the teams were pretty awesome as well ;)

Daily Video Highlights:
- Day 1 Founders - (Yandex) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRBUCCWTE4
- Day 2 Product - (Mozilla, Soundcloud etc) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1TJ_TZ7pK8&feature=related
- Day 3 Growth - (FON, McClure) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ygYMB58FO8&feature=related
- Day 4 Demo Day - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xffj0TcXUf0&feature=related
Some of the news coverage:
Seedcamp announcements:
- Teams: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-week-breaking-records-yet-again.html
- New partnerships: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-partners-experts-and-angels.html
- New advisors & investors: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/our-new-advisory-board-and-investors.html
- New corporate relationships: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-founders-pack-sponsors-and-seedhack.html
- Investors at Demo Day: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/top-20-seedcamp-teams-present-at-demo-day.html

Tweetdeck: FT for the Social Web

2011-05-26T08:45:00.004+01:00

Congrats to Iain along with Tom, Reza, Sol (Peer), Sam and the rest of the Tweetdeck team on the sale to Twitter.

It feels like a long journey from the "you're going to love this" email sent by John Borthwick in Jan 2009 introducing me to Tweetdeck with an offer for Betaworks and TAG to work together to help support Iain in building out Tweetdeck in London.

When we met Iain, he was a one man band, based in the tech mecca of Tonbridge Wells. But as a lone developer he had created some real magic. Tweetdeck was making signal out of Twitter's noise with a simple but very powerful UX innovation - columns. This insight had already made Tweetdeck the leading desktop client for Twitter and its stayed there.

Tweetdeck always had the most engaged users on Twitter: most tweets per user, most followers per user and compared to traditional media, a massive daily active user base spending hours within the application. We used to talk about Tweetdeck as the "FT for the social web" - the place to access, engage and ultimately monetize the most active, connected and influential users on Twitter - and therefore in social media. I really believe that along with Iain and his team, Twitter have the potential to do amazing things with this asset - done well, this could have as much of a transformative impact for Twitter as Summize.

It has been a total blast working with Iain - he is a superb product leader and I will cherish our jam sessions. But it was also cool to watch Iain create a team and go from being alone, to adding the firepower of the young, but superb Peer team (a small TAG investment) and then with Sam and the leadership and support of the awesome John and Andy at Betaworks, building a true NY-LON organization.

As the UK government tries to build a narrative in East London about the emerging tech cluster in Shoreditch, Tweetdeck and Iain are a great case study: housed at Moo; shared workspace with Amee, Dopplr, Groupspaces, Lightbox and SparkPR; bootstrapped with Skype (Taavet, Nicola, Priidu, Joonathan) and Last.fm (Toby) alumni -- and acquired by a US tech titan building out a presence in London :)

Ok, so the story doesn't always end that way - or have to.

Maybe one day European tech, media and communications companies will have the vision and the ambition to do some of the buying themselves. But for now, London can have a day in the sun and here's to seeing Tweetdeck help Twitter develop an even more powerful offering for the power users engaged in influencing the growth and evolution of the social web.

The journey has just begun, it was a pleasure for me and Robin to be a small part of it, stay tuned for much more from Iain and his team.

Inside the Music Industry

2011-01-25T01:12:00.005Z

Really enjoyed the 48 hours I spent at my first MIDEM.

It was fascinating to be inside the music industry for a few days, meet really interesting people and see how the landscape is changing.

I really learned a lot talking to smart people like Vince Bannon and Ted Cohen who have seen every shade of the industry in the last 20 years, Denzyl Feigelson who has helped Steve Jobs re-architect the industry with iTunes and Mat from Metric who is creating a new way for bands to get born and built in the digital age. I also met some really cool companies like Echonest, Topspin, etc

At Index, having invested in Listen.com (Rhapsody) and Last.fm (CBS), we continued to invest in music - focussing mainly on two themes around how fans experience and enjoy music:

live: Songkick and Viagogo
listening: Doubletwist, rjdj, Sonos and Soundcloud

People love music, they always have done and as the industry changes, driven by the web and new technologies - we continue to think its a really promising area to be in.

Related articles

Marking the Day

2011-01-20T10:04:00.008Z

So many lessons learned from the 8 year journey that ended up being called Lovefilm.

Today, the torch passed to Amazon - I know there's lots more of this story to tell.

Project RFC $10m+

2011-01-11T01:12:00.005Z

What is it?
A request for an open list by city or region (#citylist) of the tech startups in the last 10 years who are cracking the revenue code.

We are looking for businesses with $10m+ revenue run-rate (RFC $10m+), the companies who may not all become members of the Internet Dow, but are certainly contenders for its Fortune 500.

This is not a traditional RFC - although the underpinnings of everyone of these businesses are highly technical and are being built with a healthy mixture of open-source and cloud. A big point of evolutions, is that in many of these businesses the key new muscles they are developing are increasingly design and commercial.

Why?
In case we hadn't noticed, business has changed - radically. In the last few years the Internet has created at very significant businesses of incredible scale and with remarkable growth rates -companies like Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Vente Privee and Zynga have gone from $0m to $1bn at mind-blowing speeds.

These are rare birds and they are the ones which people focus on. But there are already hundreds of other start-ups who have racked up very substantial revenues in the last 10 years and as Gilt, Groupon, Skye and Vente Privee increasingly show, many of these businesses are no longer in the Valley.

So in the spirit of learning from more of the great businesses across the Internet that are not just creating buzz and great Alexa numbers, but great revenue numbers - here's let's try RFC $10m+.

Hopefully this will help us to draw our some new strands of knowledge to supplement the amazing thinking being done around lean-startups and form some solid opinions on what makes great businesses, as well as great products.

How does it work?
Simple. The #citylists are not meant to be completely accurate or exhaustive - these are private companies, so how could they be.

Hopefully we can evolve decent coverage in some major tech hubs, so at least when you're travelling you have a good idea who you should try and visit :)

How can you help?
For now, Quora seems as good a place as any to keep the lists evolving.

Today I kicked off with #londonlist - and put in some markers for #paris, #berlin, #nordics, #israel and #nyc. Please help flesh them out - and share with your friends who can contribute.

This should be enough to get going with and hopefully spark a good discussion - not just about the companies themselves, but about the approaches they are taking to create great Internet businesses, not just buzz.

What about the Bay Area?
Go for it. But to be fair, we'd probably have to do #mtnview, #cupertino, #redwoodshores, #paloalto - #valley is too easy :)

Excited by the launch of Seedsummit.org

2010-12-07T07:54:00.002Z

See post http://seedsummit.org/blog/

3d organizations

2010-11-16T02:22:00.005Z

Something I've been thinking about for some time - the ideal shape of a startup organization and what it means for the longer term

Decided to post on Quora to see what happens....

Introducing Index Seed – Going back to our roots

2010-04-25T18:19:00.002+01:00

Post announcing Index Seed is now live here and collaboration with TAG here

Really excited about this, more to follow

Presentation @ Plugg 2010

2010-03-15T21:28:00.002Z

It was great fun presenting at Plugg 2010 in Brussels last week about the opportunities for European entrepreneurs to build game changing businesseses and learn to play nicely with the US.

If you're interested, here are the slides....

Europe needs to learn to play nicely

View more presentations from cape.

and video....

Can Europe Compete? A VC Perspective from Plugg Conference on Vimeo.

Seedsummit - network for active seed investors

2009-12-10T16:00:00.011Z

Tomorrow morning we're bringing together around 60 folks like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu for the first edition of Seedsummit.

Seedsummit is a new event produced by Seedcamp, which aims to bring together twice a year a critical mass of our region's most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs.

Creating a distributed network for European startups

To succeed in creating an start-up ecosystem that can repetitively and sustainably build global leaders, Europe has to deal with the critical issue of fragmentation.

Seedcamp has spent the last few years very focused on building the beginnings of a network model for entrepreneurs. We've tried to lessen the constraints and isolation of geography by giving people the best possible access to a distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across our region, who can help them aim high and build ambitious global businesses.

At Seedcamp we believe we need to make our geographic distribution and cultural diversity part of our strength, so we've pushed the network out across the region with programs in London, Berlin, Paris, Ljubljana, Helsinborg, Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Kiev and San Francisco. In 2010 we intend to extend this to Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague and New York.

This network model is the right focus and one that Seedcamp will deepen and maintain.

Leveraging the network for seed investors

One of the things we've learnt with Seedcamp is that there is a huge amount of seed investment activity across our region.

But right now it is fragmented, in pockets, shares no learnings and almost never networks. In fact, there is no dedicated regional network that brings together active seed investors in a concentrated way and these are the folks that entrepreneurs (including Seedcamp ones) often look to as their first source of capital.

So with Seedsummit, we are trying to create an informal forum where the people most actively investing in seed can get together, share best practices and dealflow.

Why is seed so important?

While micro-seed funds like Seedcamp, Techstars and YCombinator do an awesome job of helping start-ups get off the ground and traditional venture firms are great at providing early stage and growth capital, seed investing provides a vital bridge between prototype and establishing product/market fit.

Even before today's well worn arguments about the lower cost of starting businesses, seed has always played a vital role in any vibrant and successful start-up ecosystem. In the Valley, enlightened seed investors like Mike Markkula ($250k into Apple in 1977), Andy Bechtolsheim ($100k into Google in 1998) and Peter Thiel ($500k into Facebook in 2004) have given some of today's biggest technology players their start.

But more than just capital, the best seed investors provide critical advice, mentoring, connections and qualified access to top-tier capital when and if that becomes appropriate for start-ups.

Seed networks are developing strongly outside of Europe

While seed investing used to be the preserve of a few well intentioned individuals, seed in all key markets is becoming professionalized and there is now an incredible network of active stage investors and firms.

In the Valley there are folks like Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, Mike Maples, XG Ventures, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and the SV Angel crew, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Allen Morgan, True Ventures and OATV. On the East Coast there is Union Square, First Round and the emergence of Betaworks and Founder Collective. Obviously there are also great investors in Boulder, LA, Vancouver, Boston and Seattle as well. In Israel there is Yossi Vardi of course and the TechAviv angels and across continents float Esther Dyson and Joi Ito.

In all of these markets - especially the Valley and Tel Aviv - there is enough concentration and flow that not only do startups have great choice but investors can share best practices, access more filtered dealflow and find great syndicate partners. As with any network, everyone improves by more participation and information flow.

So what about Europe?

In Europe we do have some very active seed investors and some venture firms like Index, Mangrove and Eden are institutional investors who are active at the earliest stages in the market.

People like Oliver Jung, Lukasz Gadowski, Martin Varsavsky, TAG, the Samwers, Atomico, Morten Lund, Brent Hoberman & Michael Birch, Klaus Hommels, Stefan Glaenzer, Sherry Coutu and the Cambridge angels have collectively done hundreds of deals in the last 5 years.

But the market is fragmented - syndicates which form easily in the Valley, Israel or New York often are hard to create. Sometimes it even hard to get people in London and Cambridge investing together, never mind Germany and France.

This is the goal of Seedsummit

Get these guys together - at least twice a year and make it easier for these active seed investors to work together and learn from each other, so it becomes easier for entrepreneurs to source and experience superior seed capital.

As with so much else in Europe we have a long long way to go, but like Seedcamp three years ago we have to start somehwere and that where is tomorrow when we have over 50 active investors from UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Nordics and the US come together to connect....

I'm really looking forward to it and seeing what happens.

Seedcamp: thoughts on the evolution of a European startup

2009-11-08T00:39:00.019Z

Why write this post?
People often ask me about Seedcamp - why we started it, what's it about and where's it going. I also haven't put any thoughts down on the subject of building startups in Europe for over two years. It occurred to me that as a European startup itself, looking at Seedcamp might give a view on both. So this is a lot longer than 140 characters but hopefully this answers some of the questions. Anyway, here goes....

Why did we start Seedcamp?
The genesis of Seedcamp was a post I wrote back in February 2007 called "Y Europe can seed the growth of its new stars". The thesis was that there was no reason why Europe couldn't produce great start-ups, we had:

Plenty of technical talent
Access to increasingly sophisticated risk capital
More and more role models & an emerging startup ecosystem of mentors
Globalization of the web which no longer put the US at the centre
Radical lowering of start-up costs

None of this has changed in the last 3 years - if anything, it is more true than ever given:

the further development of open source;
the emergence of cloud services;
the bootstrapped role models of 37signals, FreshBooks and the like;
the mass-market adoption of new distribution platforms like Facebook & iPhone

So what's the real problem with Europe?
Mike Arrington knows that its not just that people like long-lunches. The problem is our region's cultural complexity and geographic fragmentation. When you include Africa and the Middle East, there are over 50 viable markets within a 5 hour time zone - the same time zone that separates New York and Silicon Valley. Instead of 50 states with one government, one language, one currency and one set of media - we have 50 countries. Say no more.

If you want to get everything in one place, there is nowhere better in the world than the Valley. It is perfectly self-contained.

But if you want to tap into the diversity of talent, ideas and culture you can see from Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Budapest, London, Amman, Kiev and everything in between then you need a different and more distributed approach.

Can Seedcamp's distributed approach work?
We don't have the density of the Valley and quite frankly never will, so we need to deal with what we have and make the best of it.

Personally, I believe passionately in the distributed model. I think over time, with the right institutions and networked infrastructure it is capable of producing serious technical and business alchemy.

Seedcamp was designed to be a way of bringing together the different strands of the ecosystem together - entrepreneurs, investors, advisors, academia and corporates. A grass roots attempt to bring some cohesion into the region's diverse and highly fragmented startup scene with a focus on the first-time, most inexperienced entrepreneurs.

Seedcamp is one several positive initiatives, including the great work Mike Butcher is doing taking Techcrunch across Europe, that Loic & Geraldine Le Meur do every December with their LeWeb conference and the forum for European founders Brent Hoberman & Marc Samwer put on every summer with Johnnie Goodwin & Jeffries.

We all have a very long way to go
I know people say that long-term thinking is unfashionable in our industry, but I agree with Fred Wilson and my dad that great things take time. In my mind, helping to bring some cohesion to our region's distributed network of talent, capital and advisors is a 15-20 year project.

No single organization can achieve this. Even if Seedcamp is not ultimately a success - as measured by the success of the entrepreneurs who have been funded by it or experienced its programs - hopefully it will have helped to inspire some of the right thinking.

Getting to the right point takes time, and the cycles that kicked off what we now know as Silicon Valley began nearly 50 years ago.

Investing legends like Arthur Rock (Fairchild Semiconductor), Don Valentine (Cisco, Apple, EA), Don Lucas (Oracle), Dave Marquardt (Microsoft) and John Doerr (Netscape, Amazon, Google) and the entrepreneurs they backed created franchise businesses that still dominate the technology industry today. But maybe more importantly, all these businesses created the raw materials (talent, seed capital and technology) for next generation of the today's winners like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and many many others.

In Europe and Israel, we have been going for no more than 15 years - so we need to maintain the perspective to think long-term, to build great franchise businesses and have the patience to reap the rewards of the ecosystems they will help to create.

Plus, how many independent technology titans do we have in our region today? Not enough.

A truly great independent technology business is capable of doing what Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, VMware have all done - generating a billion dollars in annual revenues. In our region, its hard to look much beyond SAP, Amdocs and Checkpoint - sorry Nokia doesn't count but Skype is on its way.

[An interesting sidenote is that none of Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Checkpoint or VMware took in more than $10m in outside capital. They were just great businesses.]

What can Seedcamp do to help?
Seedcamp is a 2.5 year old startup focused on micro-seed investing, so only so much.

We launched Seedcamp with the idea that we would hold 3 years worth of Seedcamp Weeks and make small €50k investments in 15 companies. Here's the launch post and presentation.

We knew the problem we were trying to address was large enough to be worthwhile and we had a long-term vision for what we could achieve, but like any start-up we only had limited resources to prove:

there was a need for our product in the market ("make something people need")
we could operate to the benefit of all our stakeholders (customers, partners, investors)

Seedcamp's first 100 days were like any other startup

You always need inspiration. I was inspired by the work that Paul Graham was doing with YCombinator and some conversations I was having with John Borthwick about new models for startups.
You always need some luck. I was really fortunate to be introduced by Mike Arrington at FOWA to Reshma Sohoni.
You always need a great co-founder. Reshma was at 3i at the time but thanks to some enlightened management from Mike Reid (now at Frog) and Daniel Waterhouse (now at Wellington), she was seconded to help and we set about developing a program and getting support for what would become Seedcamp.
You always need the focus of a deadline. In July, we set ourselves a launch date of September
You always need ambitious challenges. We set ourselves the two month task of:

getting applications from all over Europe
finding a venue for a week in September (and putting on the event)
getting over 100 top-notch mentors to inspire and advise entrepreneurs
raising €2m (enough money for 3 years of Seedcamp)

You always need some sceptics. We had many.
You always need loads of support. In addition to Index and 3i who encouraged me and Reshma to develop Seedcamp, we had a great group of initial supporters who helped us brainstorm the concept and produce the event including Paul Birch, Sara Murray, Mattias Ljungman, Robin Klein and Jason Goodman.

So after 2.5 years what has changed from the original Seedcamp plan?

We have expanded our regional footprint considerably
- We planned to run only 3 events in 3 years all in London - we ended up doing over 22 events in 3 years in 10 countries
- We learned pretty quickly people wanted Seedcamp in more locations and now run Mini Seedcamp's in 7 regional hubs across the year
- We've reviewed our 1,500 applications from 53 countries
- We have had winners from Estonia, Romania, Slovenia, Poland and Jordan - we have proven to ourselves that their is both demand for what we offer and great startups from all over the region
We built a bigger, more diverse network of advisors & partners
- We started off with 100 advisors at the first Seedcamp week in 2007 (albeit superstars!)
- We now have over 1,000 people to help support startups across every dimension of their journey - product, marketing, business development, investment etc
- The depth & breadth of this network means that at every event in every region we have at least 50 amazing advisors to support the winning teams
- We've also had incredible support from the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Sun, AWS, Oracle and Facebook to give teams access to knowledge, technology and support
- We've had additional great board input from the likes of Fred Destin, Alex Hoye, Dave McClure, Christophe Maire, Charles Grimsdale and Oliver Beste
We've made more investments than we planned
- We planned to make 15 investments and mentor 60 companies
- We've made 21 investments and mentored 280 companies so far:
  - 2007: Kublax, Hypernumbers, MyBuilder, RentmineOnline, Tablefinder, Zemanta
  - 2008: Basekit, Kyko, Mobclix, Soup, Stupeflix, Toksta, Ubervu
  - 2009: Boxed Ice, Brainient, Codility, Erply, Kwaga, Patients Know Best, Platago, Talasim

And what hasn't changed?

We are still a fund - we are not a non-profit. We believe in having a mission which has social good at its core, but we have always set out to be a commercial enterprise that offers a return to our investors. How else could we inspire entrepreneurs to create businesses if we were not one ourselves?
But like YC (and Techstars) we are a different kind of fund - we apply a new model to discovering, supporting and launching start ups.
We address the micro-seed stage - we invest €50k in a start-up in return for a small amount of equity (normally 5-10%), which means the kind of companies we can help leverage the platforms and practices outlined above and the founders typically have low personal burn-rates
Our founders are focussed on bootstrapping - we help support teams through to "ramen" or real-profitability (3 out of 8 of this year's winners are already profitable)
We help teams that want it, access seed or venture capital - by working hand-in-hand with investors active in seed (€250k-€1m) and venture (€1m+) rounds

What are some of the questions people still ask us about Seedcamp?
We try to be as open as we can about who we are and what we do, but as a startup running fast you aren't always as clear as you think and you can definitely be misunderstood at times. [Mike Butcher should be posting later on today an interview answering some of questions on Seedcamp - will update with link].

So in that spirit here are some FAQs:

Who are Seedcamp's investors?
- We raised over €2m to make investments and operate Seedcamp
- Our investors have always been prominently listed on our site
- They include some of Europe's top venture firms and seed investors, as well as firms large and small actively involved in the startup ecosystem
Why did they invest in Seedcamp?
- For different reasons but mainly because they share our vision for building the regions startup infrastructure
- They want to have filtered access to great startup to invest in or advise
- They like us :) and believe we will make good invests which give a positive ROI
Can only Seedcamp investors invest in Seedcamp companies?
- Absolutely not, anyone who's a qualified investor can invest in Seedcamp companies
- Seedcamp investors do often get to know the companies better as they have typically put in the time and commitment to come to Seedcamp events but any mentors, corporates or readers of Techcrunch (who regularly covers Seedcamp finalists) are free to invest and often do
- We love it when people want to invest in the companies, it means we're doing our job :)
How does Seedcamp judge the finalists for Seedcamp Week and Mini Seedcamps?
- We have an open web-based application process in the months running up to every event
- Every application is reviewed by and scored at least two judges - the judges are a combination of Seedcamp investors and advisors- all of them very experienced at looking at startup plans and teams
- We normalize the scores to counteract variations in judging styles and then invite the top 20 teams to attend a Mini Seedcamp
- In the case of Seedcamp Week, we invite 40 teams to come to London for a 10 minute interview with a panel of judges and then apply the same scoring techniques
How does Seedcamp make its investment decisions?
- All Seedcamp investors are invited to participate in the investment committee decision of making any €50k investment as we are allocating their capital
- This group is often more than 25 people which is unusually large (and sometimes unwieldy) group for an investment committee, even a large venture firms would have no more 10 people
- Like Seedcamp judging, all teams are scored, the votes normalized and a debate held to determine which companies to invest in. As she will spend the majority of timw with the companies Reshma has a veto right
What if I want to invest in Seedcamp?
- Seedcamp I is now closed.
- Seedcamp was funded in a couple of months by over 30 different organisations and individuals - all of whom have a clear interest in helping to build the startup ecosystem and want to be exposed to the best startups the region has to offer.
- Some of Europe's best VCs, angels and professional firms large and small participated and Seedcamp welcomes investment from all these groups.
- Our aim has always been that Seedcamp would be 'owned' by the industry and not dominated by any group of institutions or individuals. For that reason, we encourage wide ownership and look forward to expanding and diversifying this base.
- The structure is a typical Limited Partner one and the formal fundraising for Seedcamp II will begin very soon.
When do you intend to raise Seedcamp II?
- We'll be talking to investors in the next few months about our next fund.
- We hope to retain many of our existing investors but hope to be able to work with many of the new investors we have met since we began, especially in new regions and in the public/private sector

So are we succeeding so far with Seedcamp?
We've definitely shown that there is a need for what Seedcamp offers.

Whether we have been able to deliver value to the stake holders (startups, partners and investors) is something we'll only be able to judge in time. The reality of startups and the funds that invest in them, is that most businesses take 5-10 years to become great - in fact many will take longer and most will never succeed.

What we know so far:

Startups: we do know from the research we've done that startups really value the experience and focus on the business advice, networking and validation that Seedcamp offers even more than the access to capital - this is great news.
Partners: we have had great feedback from advisors and partners. They seem to value not just the filtered access to really promising teams, but something which has surprised us, is how much fun people have mentoring. We have mentors who have become long-term advisors, invested in and in one case become the CEO of a Seedcamp company. Mentors also tell us how much they like the peer-to-peer networking of meeting each another and interacting in a new type of setting (ie not a conference).
Investors: the Seedcamp fund has its own group of investors (see our site), feel free to ask them if they are happy :) But the investors which matter to the startups are the ones that will fund them - the good news is that within 3 months of graduating from Seedcamp 2007 and 2008, 11 of the 13 startups have received follow-on funding.

So where does Seedcamp go beyond the start-up phase, what's Seedcamp II?
We've had plenty of discussion over the last year to think about where to take Seedcamp next.

We like to think we've made a good start, but we really understand how much work there is still to do. We've also learned some fundamental lessons in operating Seedcamp that we'd like to apply to the next phase of our development.

Some of the key things we feel strongly about in terms of improving the model are:

We want to continue pushing the federated model - not just deepening our roots in the regions we are already playing in, but also starting to go into regions where people have asked us to take Seedcamp but so far we've not had the resources or bandwidth to go
We want to extend our network - one of the things people have liked the most about Seedcamp is how we've been able to bring some cohesion to the fragmented startup scene across the region. We know we can do a better job bringing together active seed investors, tapping into academia and working with public/private partnerships focussed on encouraging startups.
We should be making more investments - not just because we think the talent is out there and we are only just starting to really find it but because the economics of investing means that to have great returns you have to place enough bets. This is true of growth, venture and seed (look at the portfolio sizes of Jeff Clavier, Josh Kopelman, Ron Conway and TAG) - its especially true of micro-seed and something YC is aware of as well.
We need to have fire power to follow our winners - early stage investing doesn't make economic sense if you can't follow your winners. Most startups need additional capital - even though as I pointed out above, some superstars don't need more than $10m. Unless you are lucky enough to be the guy who wrote a $300k cheque which turned out to be the only money into Checkpoint as more money goes in you get more diluted. Good seed investors (like First Round Capital) know that you need to firepower to keep funding your winners, both to ensure they have enough capital and to presever your ownership. Managing and allocating reserves is a very tough discipline, but one that great investors practice and do very well.
We need to be able to attract and retain a killer team - sparing her blushes Reshma has done an amazing job, as Seedcamp scales we need to add to our team at the highest levels and we need to be able to attract and retain people like that. Micro-seed is a special discipline - it means rolling up our sleeves and working with businesses and entreprenuers that are very unformed. This is not a skill all investors have and if Seedcamp is to succeed we need the best team to support these startups.

So will we be able to take Seedcamp to the next level? I hope so, but like any startup, its hard to know what's around the next corner - as I said above, even if Seedcamp doesn't succeed to go from startup to phase two, hopefully we'll have inspired some of the right thinking.

Super excited about Songkick

2009-06-09T00:03:00.008+01:00

Today the team at Songkick publicly rolls out the labour of love which they've been working on for the last year - and I'm really excited about it and very proud of the team.

Why? Well, for a few reasons.

First, the service they've built is really killer. They have taken all the distributed passion and energy that fans pour into gigographies and live music across the web and pulled it all together in one place. The service launches with over 1m gigs past, present and future and the team has built a social layer around the content letting you really get lost in the venues, the bands and the music. If you love live music, you'll love this product and it has a real shot at becoming the home for live music on the web.

Second, they are playing in the most exciting and potentially the most valuable part of the music industry. While recorded music is in trouble, live music is growing like crazy. For fans the emotional attachment we have to concerts and festivals is something unique and for artists live is the place where you get your start, make your mark and is the mainstay of your income throughout your career regardless of your label. Artists and their managers control live music and as labels have lost control over the recorded product, live has become a pivot which is revolutionizing the industry.

Third, the Songkick team led by Ian, Pete and Michelle have really shown themselves to be great start-up role models for the next generation of European entrepreneurs. When I first met them in Boston a few years ago as they were leaving YC, they said they wanted to aim high and bring a passion to succeed and build something really big into the London start-up scene. There are some teams you meet you want to back immdiately, and they haven't disappointed. They are shooting for the moon but they have always kept their feet on the ground. They have been very strategic about investors, partners and hires and are incredibly disciplined controlling their costs and managing their time. Hard things for first time entrepreneurs. Sure they've made mistakes but they learn fast and adapt. Hallmarks of people who can build something big.

So, well done Songkick. To all the team. I know its been a huge effort to go live and you've all been itching to show the world what you can do - enjoy it. To liv music fans, enjoy it too both th trip down memory lane and all the gigs to come.

No blogging for ages

2009-05-28T00:15:00.003+01:00

Twitter has made me very lazy when it comes to my blog, even lazier than before - hard I know.

So in no particular order here's a few random things/posts/businesses in the making which have been on my mind:

The Value of Live, Real-Time Web and Twitter
Socially Constructed Services
Smart Energy
Beyond the Banner & Social Advertising - what happens when $20bn industry implodes
Disruptive Consumer Financial Services for the Bottom of the Pyramid
Places to innovate in Education
The inescapable weight of the cost structures of Traditional Media
Transparency & Provenance in all things, but especially food
Successful blends (people, companies, countries) of Creative/Business/Technology
Company building and relay races
Seedcamp 2.0
Micro-seed/Seed/Early-stage investment models

And of course, my wonderful family.... :)

Anything else I should be thinking about? Who should I be talking to on the points above? Any of them you think are worth major focus....

Is anyone still reading this?

See you at www.twitter.com/cape via Tweetdeck of course :)

Good overview for using Tweetdeck

2009-02-25T17:09:00.002Z

Latest Twitterings

2009-02-23T10:52:00.001Z

follow me on Twitter

Reshma being interviewed @Seedcamp Tel Aviv

2009-02-02T20:28:00.004Z

Reshma and team did a great job at Mini Seedcamp Tel Aviv - really great to see excellent teams, mentors and the Seedcamp network adding another (and really critical node) in Israel.

Getting sucked into Twittersphere...

2009-02-01T13:01:00.005Z

and predictably wondering what role my blog plays going forward... even starting to have the sense that facebook is getting less useful in comparison to twittersphere via tweetdeck

nothing new here, i guess i'm late to that particularly party (there are nearly 20m results on Google on this topic) but the tipping point that twitter has hit over the last few months following the summize acquisition means that other than the 140 character limit, there's not much keeping me off-Twitter and on blog for now

would be great to have an easy way to post from blog to twitter, rather than just via the badge - i'm sure there are good ways. if you know anyone please let me know in the comments

interesting times...

Thanks to the American Voters

2008-11-07T01:21:00.004Z

What a landmark event to usher in the Obama era. Finally someone who has the leadership skills, intelligence and openness to truly represent the amazing diversity and idealism at the core of America. You really did the 5.7bn other people on the planet proud - thanks.

Looking forward to Fotonauts

2008-11-07T00:53:00.001Z

Thoughts on European Start Ups

2008-10-27T20:42:00.004Z

I had a great time putting this presentation together past week to give at the O'Reilly Web2Expo in Berlin.

Thoughts on European Start Ups

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startups vc)

Thanks to everyone for the embedding, the video and the really great feedback - much appreciated.

For some really practical advice, check out Robin's great post on cash management.

Kindo ties the knot with MyHeritage

2008-09-23T00:12:00.006+01:00

Congratulations to Nils, Gareth and Andrew and the rest of the Kindo team. They have just announced that they are tying up with MyHeritage. See coverage on Washington Post via Techcrunch, VentureBeat and PaidContent.

Over the last year the team has built a simple product which is a pleasure to use in over 14 languages -- all the while building a really nice tone of voice, perfect for the family market. Combining this savvy with MyHeritage's scale and smart technology for photos and family history promises something to look forward to for consumers.

Last Day of Seedcamp Week 2008

2008-09-22T23:57:00.002+01:00

Seedcamp Day 5 Highlights from Seedcamp

Super excited about Seedcamp

2008-09-12T21:18:00.008+01:00

It seems like last week that we were finalizing preparations for Seedcamp 07 and announcing last year's winners, now we're just 72 hours away from Seedcamp 08. I am really excited.

A lot has happened since last September and we have came an incalculable distance from the original sketch of an idea last February. Without doubt the most important thing is the impact that Reshma has had, since coming on board as CEO. She has created a super-slick organization that has taken us on the road and put on fantastic Mini Seedcamps in Paris, Berlin, Kiev and London and spread the word across Europe in places as diverse as Warsaw, Stockholm, Edinburgh, Tel Aviv and Zagreb.

We always wanted Seedcamp to be much more than a once year event and with the development of Mini Seedcamps, Reshma has driven the brand across Europe - deepening relationships with advisors, investors and most importantly founders. We have found great talent and passion for building companies wherever we go and the result is that Seedcamp is now a much richer platform for supporting entrepreneurs both locally and across the region. In one year this is no mean feat, so hats off to the team and look out for more developments next year.

All of this effort has led to a really exciting line up for this year's Seedcamp Week, which starts next Monday Sept 15th.

We have a great set of teams from across the globe - including Austria, Poland, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, France, Germany, Slovenia, US, India and Sweden. Happily we also have some teams from the UK, but not just from London - from Wales as well. The diversity is fantastic and shows how wide the talent pool really is in Europe and that killer teams can come from anywhere nowadays - although Zemanta, taught us that lesson last year by putting Slovenia on the Internet map.

But to me, the coolest thing about Seedcamp is how generous and engaged the community of advisors and investors have been throughout the year. We don't have the built-in network and easy informality of the Valley in Europe and one of the key motivators for Seedcamp (and OpenCoffee) was to help kick start this process.

People like Fred Destin in Paris, Oliver Beste in Berlin, Alex Hoye in general and the rest of the Seedcamp Board, Advisory Panel & Judges have all been incredibly generous with their time, energy and networks to support the emergence of an ecosystem. The resulting line up of panelists and advisors (many of them are repeat offenders from last year!) is awe-inspiring for any first-time entrepreneur looking to get feedback, guidance and support within Europe.

The 23 Seedcamp teams coming to London next week will be bringing along 53 founders and those founders will be able to spend next week intensively hearing from and having one-one mentoring sessions with over 220 advisors including serial entrepreneurs, hackers, investors, product designers, marketeers and lawyers. As one of the advisors said when they saw the list "Wow". I agree. I can't wait to hear what they all have to say and hang out next week.

I know you're meant to save the "thank yous" for after the event - I mean you don't really know how it going to go - but I also know that next week most of the attention will go to the star panelists, the advisors and the Seedcamp teams.

So I wanted to take a minute to publicly give some attention to the Seedcamp team who has really kickassed to pull this all together:

Reshma - of course, the driving force behind it all, she has put the team together and is slowly but surely building a fabulous brand and organization
Michael - our first Seedcamp Fellow, who with one eye on LBS has managed all the Seedcamp applications and judging process, our much improving online presence(s) and has always maintained an uniquely morland tone whether in word or in wordle
Steph - the firebrand who makes all the logistics seem effortless and when she's not behind a camera has put together Paris, Kiev, Berlin and now London's Seedcamp Week
Alasdair - has single-handedly pulled together our amazing group of advisors, made sure they know where they are going and matched them up with the teams

Thanks also go out to Rachel, Paula and Collette for getting the word out and to Kellee who has just joined the Seedcamp team and is already kicking off some very cool stuff.

I'm really looking forward to next Monday :)

Imagini partners with Hotels.com

2008-09-11T21:50:00.004+01:00

Imagini, a relatively early TAG investment which now includes Atomico and Northzone as investors, has always been at the cutting edge of developing really creative and useful applications of its VisualDNA technology. Even from its earliest days, people seemed to have always loved the metaphor of using your response to certain images to help you discover the people and things you might like.

The core offering is now wrapped in a service called Youniverse which builds on the original idea of people finding people based on their VisualDNA, but has also now added apps for travel, health, movies and dating as well as working on specific applications with brands like MyDeco and Pepsi.

The newest application with Hotels.com is a really great application of the technology - selecting some images which map to your ideal travel experiences leads you to a filtered list of hotels which would suit your taste and mood. Very cool stuff. Give it a try.

Fotonauts launches at TC50

2008-09-11T15:21:00.003+01:00

Jean-Marie does a great job introducing Fotonauts at TC50.

See some of the great feedback on the web from Dan Farber's "Wikipedia for photos" and Erick Schonfeld's "Fotonauts is a gorgeous photopedia".

TAG is thrilled to be part of a great founding investor group alongside folks like Joi Ito, Brad Silverberg at Ignition, Jeff Clavier, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and Banexi.

If you're interested in trying it out, sign up for the private beta on the site.

Fantastic growth for Daylife

2008-08-20T22:42:00.005+01:00

Daylife has been making fantastic progress growing its traffic rank and pages views on Alexa.

It wasn't immediately obvious to many people how powerful Daylife was in terms of presenting a new way for readers to experience the news and for publishers to tap into an awesome
and flexible platform for extending their inventory -- but the extremely talented team has done a great job and the results are starting to be plain for all to see.

Not only are the numbers starting to speak for themselves but the creativity among both developers and partners that Daylife has unleashed is starting to look truly impressive.

Long live news :)

Seedcamp application zeitgeist

2008-08-17T21:04:00.002+01:00

Fabulous tagcloud analysis of Seedcamp applications from our esteemed fellow, Mr Orland :) Check it out and good luck to everyone who applied...

We thought it might be interesting to take the several hundred applications we received and look for some aggregate patterns, so I grabbed the answers to some of the more relevant questions and (after a little sed manipulation to strip HTML and make sure no confidential application info slipped through) fed them to Jonathan Feinberg's excellent Wordle. The results are below. It's a little dirty (e.g. I wish "open" and "source" were one phrase) but even without too much manual polish it should be a good indicator. Enjoy - and be sure to click through for the full size images.Morland, seedcamp: 2008 application zeitgeist, Aug 2008

Spotrunner talks to BoomTown

2008-07-31T21:57:00.001+01:00

Video starts to really mean business

2008-07-24T23:02:00.007+01:00

Forget about LonelyGirl15, the emergence of Hulu and the Google/YouTube vs Viacom battle of the titans -- an emerging story for me is how video is really becoming a mainstream part of standard web business communications.

So, kudos to the OpenX team. Today they released 2.6, the latest and greatest version of their open source adserving software including an API and enhanced dashboard really integrating the community.

New CEO Tim Cadogan explains it all in this great video.

We've seen some really interesting new uses of video so far this year - from Loic Le Meur's video comments with Seesmic through to the great new video interviews that are starting to become a staple diet of mainstream blogs. Of course, you can't forget Moo's very memorable video promo for their minicards - now with nearly 3m views on YouTube.

f you haven't seen it, there's also some great video content from last year's Seedcamp. Looking forward to seeing what cool new uses people find for video communications next.

Alexa loves Netlog, I Still Love Alexa

2008-07-24T22:29:00.003+01:00

You can say what you like about Alexa, vs Compete, vs Google Trends, vs ComScore, vs Netratings.

I still love Alexa and I still love this chart :)

Netlog remains a European powerhouse with over 35m users across 19 languages and for all Bebo's lustre in mainstream media and the $850m price-tag which AOL put on it -- this is very very impressive performance by the Ghent's best kept secret. Keep up the great work guys.

From First Timer to Funded -- Valuing Validation

2008-07-18T01:57:00.005+01:00

Raising money if you're an entrepreneur is tough at the best of times, but if you're a first time entrepreneur its incredibly difficult because the reassurance investors look for more than anything else when they look to fund is validation.

There were lots of interesting conversational threads at dinner last night with Fred Wilson and 15 first-timers from the TAG and Seedcamp networks but this theme of building validation and how important it is for entrepreneurs really stuck with me.

Validation comes in many forms: previous successes, persuading a killer person to join your team or even be an advisor, signing a paying customer, acquiring lots of users, getting positive press or blog reviews. The list goes on. But without some form of validation, however good your idea might sound - if you have no track-record its just so hard to get off the ground.

First timers have no start-up track record - they have to build one.

So how do you do that and how do places like Seedcamp or YCombinator help?

Its hard to get to achieve most of the list above at the very early stages, so probably the biggest thing that Seedcamp and YCombinator do is that they force teams to ship - and ship quickly.

We both want teams that can code, not just think, and the added forcing function of limited time and limited capital makes getting something out the door imperative. There's nothing like a deadline to keep focus.

Its not important to have a finished product, even less a finished plan - what's important is to show that you can create a prototype that you can share with other people: a verbal and visual representation (to paraphrase Fred's great point) of what's going on inside the collective heads of your team.

To be both an accomplished hacker and a painter in just three months with virtually no money is an endurance test - you need to have great co-founders and you need to have great support. Paul Graham and his team have created an excellent model and its a model for our times.

There is nothing more validating at an early stage than a team that shows how they can bootstrap with limited resources to produce something which solves a real problem and that people want.

First timers who have come through YCombinator or Seedcamp have real validation. They have been filtered in the application process, they have had feedback from smart, experienced entrepreneurs and investors and they have plugged into the collective wisdom of their peers.

This is powerful stuff. So its not surprising that for many investors, teams who have been through these programs have a real mark of validation that makes it a lot easier to take an investment risk on a first timer.

In today's environment, if you are in your 20s and you put [society's] [your parent's] economic fears aside, there has never been a better time to be a first-timer.

Sttart-up costs are incredibly low (read Josh Kopelman's post on the "Price of Failure") and there is no technical excuse not to bootstrap.

Today's startup has access to:

incredibly mature open source technologies;
a globally networked talent-pool through services like LinkedIn and Xing;
incredible platforms for scaleable infrastructure and viral distribution that simply didn't exist - in most cases even 12 months ago.

We went round the table at dinner last night and 12 out of 15 companies were actively using AWS or trying out Google's new AppEngine. Everyone was using LAMP, Python; Django or Ruby. Everyone was using (or had a plan) for f8 and OpenSocial -- and of course with the new iPhone SDK people were salivating at the prospect of a mobile web that wasn't just a new channel but a new context for their applications.

There is no better or cheaper time to start a company in this space -- for little to no cost you can access on-demand infrastructure, social distribution and even monetization through AdWords or OpenX. In fact I'd argue with all the new platform innovation from Facebook, Apple and the cloud computing folks in the last year, now is even a better time than 2007.

So if you have a great idea and you've never started a business before go for it.

If you're a hacker, there's never been a better time and if you're a painter, find a hacker to work with and apply to Seedcamp (or YCombinator or Brad Feld and Dave Cohen's excellent TechStars -- they're all great and offer slightly different things).

At Seedcamp you know that if you apply and get through to the main week in London from Sept 15-19th just some of the folks you'll get to hang out with and get feedback from include:

the founders behind some of Europe's biggest recent exits like Niklas Zennstrom and Michael Birch plus the key folks behind MySQL, Lastminute, Last.fm, Buy.at, Plazes, Kelkoo and Zyb
the founders of some of Europe's most promising next generation businesses like Seatwave, WAYN, Moo, Spreadshirt, Lovefilm, Huddle and GlassesDirect
some of Europe and Israel's best seed and venture investors; including Atlas, Balderton, Amadeus, Index, Atomico, Northzone, Eden, DJF Esprit
experts in product, marketing and technology from Google, MySpace, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Sun and Oracle
folks from Techcrunch, LeWeb, FOWA, O'Reilly and the FT
plus we'll even throw in some specialists in startup legals and recruiting ;)

It's pretty intense - check out some of the content from last year. But its a lot of fun and pretty useful to the winners.

It's worth applying anyway though - lots of last year's teams who didn't make it told us how useful the application was in helping them to focus and articulate what they were trying to build.

So, if your a first-timer - especially those based in Europe, Middle East or Africa - what better way to get validated?

You have three weeks left to apply, yes apply -- we really look forward to seeing you and if not you than your friends, so spread the word.

Great content from Seedcamp 07

2008-07-17T23:59:00.006+01:00

Last September, Seedcamp brought together some of Europe's top founders, investors and advisors to bring perspective and encouragement to the next generation of young entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the great content from some of the advisors who were there last year - just some of the folks you can hear from below include Niklas Zennstrom (Skype, Joost), Marc Samwer (Jamba), Toby Rowland (uDate, King.com), Nic Brisbourne (DJF Esprit investor in WAYN, buy.at), Martin Varsavky (FON), Mike Shaver (Mozilla) and Klaus Hommels (seed investor in Xing, Skype, Stardoll).

This year is going to be even better. So if you haven't applied or know someone who would benefit from hanging out in close proximity and getting advice from people like this point them to Seedcamp applications - they close August 10th.

Dinner with Fred and company

2008-07-17T15:47:00.002+01:00

Michael had a nice post on Seedcamp blog about really fun and interesting dinner last night with Fred Wilson and some great first-time Seedcamp and TAG entrepreneurs.

Moo launches business cards

2008-07-08T10:51:00.004+01:00

Moo has launched their long awaited "regular" business cards.

I say regular because they are a shape that you would recognize but in true Moo fashion, they are anything but - in addition to their unique variable print technology which means you can have a different image on every card, the quality of the paper stock is super high and for the same price you can buy green fully recycled paper stock.

Congratulations to Richard and the team - another great product.

Introducing MOO Business Cards!
Uploaded by MOO_Crew

Great coverage of Daylife in BusinessWeek

2008-06-20T05:10:00.003+01:00

Congrats to Upe and the team at Daylife on this great article by Jon Fine in BusinessWeek - it just goes to show that persistence and patience really pays off.

Finally mainstream media is starting to really understand how influential the Daylife inventory machine can be not just for traditional media players who want to grow relevant page views without layering on significant editorial cost, but also for any company looking to fold in timely, newsworthy content into their websites.

Nice picture as well Upe :)

Moo makes a splash on YouTube

2008-03-12T22:08:00.005Z

In typical Moo fashion, the unusual has happened. Last week a video promoting their Easter Egg hunt showed up as one of the top viewed videos on YouTube - over 1.7m views so far.

This is no vanilla brand -- but rather something humorous, loved and truly viral.

Nice one guys :)

Beauty of One Box Search

2008-02-13T23:20:00.016Z

Google has made one-box searching a pleasure for the web. If the query is pretty simple and you want to find a web site rather than data, then the results, by and large are pretty good.

But you're in real trouble when you try more complex queries like "flights from London to Cape Town from May 1-12" or "property in Tribeca with 3 bedrooms". The results on Google are useless.

Traditionally vertical search engines have been better than Google at getting the right results but they have been unable to deliver a service in an such simple way with "one-box search".

Recently, Mobimissimo (an Index investment) in travel and DotHomes (a TAG investment, which used to be called Extate) in property have started to break this mould.

Although category coverage is very important in vertical search, this is relatively easy to do compared to general areas like the web, images or video as the sources of information are generally well known and fairly limited. Of course, there are major challenges in structuring data and keeping it fresh but coverage is only one piece of the jigsaw - search was never won by index size alone.

Both Mobimissimo and DotHomes offer similar or more coverage than their better known rivals such as Kayak or Trulia. But what is probably most interesting about Mobimissimo and DotHomes is that they allow queries and deliver results in an interface that is much more natural and intuitive to use -- the fabled "one-box".

To find flights on Kayak from London to Cape Town will mean you have to engage with at least 4 boxes;

with Mobissimo its one-box and when you get your results you can easily change currency, see local weather, photos from Flickr and even your Dopplr contacts.

Meanwhile in real estate, if you type "Tribeca 3 beds" into Trulia you get no results - in fact an error page;

but on DotHomes you not get results, you also get the requisite map and of course the ability to further filter results -- one box, natural language queries and immediately.

Of course it doesn't help that the prices are still sky high but at least you can find what you were looking for :)

These are some early examples of what hopefully will be a more general trend in search. Its not easy to do, but when done right a simple and natural query interface can produce a great user experience which will surely drive transaction volume significantly in critical and high-value verticals. Google did this with web search and I think the innovators in vertical search will make similar UI leaps.

If you have any other great examples, I'd love to hear about them.

Kindo's day in the sun

2008-02-13T21:58:00.015Z

Its easy to throw stones at Alexa - and we all have - but sometimes whatever the reason, its nice to have a day in the sun.

This has been a great few weeks for Kindo. Last week they announced seed funding from the technology founders of Skype, me and Robin at TAG and Stefan Glaenzer from Last.fm. Now this week Kindo has sneaked past Geni and Verwandt on Alexa.

So congratulations to Gareth, Nils, Andrew, Demian and all the rest of the really hardworking and dedicated team.

Social networks have fundamentally shifted people's online behavior. There are over a billion people online now and the web is truly global and multi-lingual - it is no longer more than 25% American or English.

When you look at the diversity of social network successes, there are global players (MySpace & Facebook) but also very significant regional (Netlog, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Skyrock) and local players (Nasza-klasa and vKontakte). What's amazing of course is that none of these sites really existed more than 3 years ago and now they are the commonest ways for people to spend their time online. In almost every market, networks and search rule and portals are dying or dead.

The most common and fastest-growing online behavior today is to build, understand and communicate through your networks.

We have networks for our friends - our social networks. We have networks for our colleagues (LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo etc) - our professional networks. Increasingly we will have networks for families - not just sites about my ancestry (family past) but about my living family (family present).

Kindo has only been in the market since late October 2007 but it has made a very fast start.

Recognizing, rather than paying lip-service to the global nature of the web is a lesson we learned at Skype and have seen again at OpenAds. Kindo its already in 14 languages and not just with translations but blogs and a genuine local flavor.

Families can be way too serious and people seem to be really responding to Kindo's sense of fu n and the authenticity and sense of fun of a global brand with local sensibility.

The market for family networks is very much just at the beginning, there is a very long way to go as these services reach maturity - but sometimes it nice to have a day in the sun.

It's a big day for Open Source

2008-01-16T22:09:00.000Z

What a great day for open source. Sun announced their $1bn acquisition of MySQL and OpenAds announced that they had raised an additional $15.5m to further develop their free ad serving solutions for publishers.

When Index first invested in MySQL in June 2003, open source was a promising but by no means proven part of the mainstream Internet. Now less than 5 years later we are now living in a world where open source technologies and the LAMP stack are fundamental to the infrastructure and development priorities of any enterprise or fast-growing business.

OpenAds has been a major beneficiary of this same trend. Quietly developing over the years into a online advertising powerhouse, its software now serves billions of ad impressions at over 30,000 publishers in 140 countries and 20 languages across the web. We announced our investment in the business in June 2007 and have been thrilled at the progress made since then in both team and product development.

The $15bn database market is huge and fundamental. It also represents the technical underpinnings of the Internet as Jonathan Schwarz said today of MySQL it is "the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs".

But the global online advertising is forecast to be worth $65bn in 2010 and as several influential commentators are beginning to realize that puts OpenAds in a very interesting position. With a new hosted service making their software even more accessible to publishers, if you weren't before - watch this space.

The Business of APIs Event on Oct 15th

2007-10-08T10:34:00.000+01:00

If you're in the Bay Area next Monday Oct 15th you should try go along to the Business of APIs event.

There is an all-star roster of speakers who are living in the trenches of building great API programs and the enabling technology and services to support them, s0 if you want to understand how to leverage web services to increase your reach this is a great place to start.

Announcing the Dopplr 100

2007-09-27T09:22:00.000+01:00

Dopplr has just opened up its invitation-only social network to business travellers from 100 leading companies and international organizations.

The Dopplr 100 is a great way of slowly opening up the service to a frequent travelers from some of the world's coolest brands who have already been active users of the service and now want to spread the word to their colleagues.

Check out the list and see if you're on it -- if not and you're a frequent traveller, please send me an email and I'll give you an invite :)

TAG recently invested in Dopplr alongside some great fellow travellers.

TAG joins Mashery Series A

2007-09-27T09:05:00.000+01:00

There is a great post today covering Mashery's latest funding round by Marshall at Read/WriteWeb.

Mashery takes a lot of the pain away from company's who want to offer access to their web services API. Customers can really focus on their API and not worry about having to manage the plumbing headaches of access controls, metering, metrics, preformance scaleablity and developer tools.

This is a serious pain point in a world of mashups and APIs. Some of Mashery's current customers include Trulia, Compete and Zoominfo.

TAG is really excited to be a small investor in Mashery's latest round of financing and join Oren and Scott's great team and some excellent existing investors to help develop their presence in Europe.

Stardolls starts to showcase DKNY and Sephora

2007-09-27T08:52:00.001+01:00

Stardoll has just announced a relationship with some of LVMH's best-known fashion brands, who will be developing a presence within the Stardoll environment.

The business has taken an incredible journey from its early days in 2004 as a hobby site for Liisa, a Finnish grandmother, who developed the earliest versions of the service with her son.

This is a major step forward for the business, which has grown remarkably to having over 10m members and is one of the most popular destinations on the web for 8-17 girls to hang out and have fun.

Kiva.org Crosses $11 Million in Microloans to Developing Nations

2007-09-14T09:42:00.000+01:00

This is one of the most impressive and inspiring services online - congrats to Kiva

Kiva.org Crosses $11 Million in Microloans to Developing Nations

Closing in on Seedcamp Week 2007

2007-08-21T23:55:00.000+01:00

from the Seedcamp blog:

So much has happened with Seedcamp in the last month, thanks to you all for your energy, enthusiasm and support.

Last Sunday night we accepted the last applications for Seedcamp Week 2007 - we were thrilled to have received 268 applications from over 40 countries. Seedcamp seems to have tapped a nerve from Uruguay to the Ukraine and we're excited to work with you all in the near future to figure out how we can best harness and continue the positive momentum.

This week is selection week. Our esteemed selection panel has been putting in serious energy into analyzing the applications and slimming that list down to a final set of interviews. By the end of the week we will have final list of 20 selected companies who'll be coming to London to spend the week of Sept 3-7 with us.

One of the things we've always said about Seedcamp, is that's its not just about the cash. Success is also about have the right context, making the right connections and gaining the right coverage.

Providing the right context
We've been inspired by the informal formats of unconferences and unevents like Barcamp and Opencoffee to try and create a style which is not just about people who've done it talking at people in an audience.

We want to provide conversation not speeches, so we have a mix of sessions where Seedcampers will hear directly from some real experts but then importantly be able to spend 1:1 time with those experts to get direct feedback on their businesses.

Seedcamp is an evolving project and this is only our first year, so we welcome any ideas and feedback you have on what topics are the most interesting to you. Please join the forums and let us know.

Making the right connections
Building a great business is partly about accessing the best and brightest talent - it can often be about knowing who to ask when you are stuck with really important questions.

We've said that being a part of Seedcamp should allow you to build a rolodex in a week it would take years to build otherwise.

So, to help teams making the best connections, we have lined up expert mentors across product design & development, marketing & pr, raising money, finding exits, negotiating big partnership, handling legals and accounting, team building. Hopefully, a lot of what teams need to sharpen their pitch and develop to be a successful business.

Joining our already impressive cast of characters during Seedcamp Week and beyond, some of the folks now include:

Entreprenuerial founders including Niklas Zennstrom, Marc Samwer, Richard Moross, Martin Varsavsky, Toby Rowland, Tariq Krim, Michael Smith, Charlie Muirhead and Alex Straub
Product Development & Design gurus like Matt Jones, Tom Coates, Leisa Reichelt, Ryan Carson, Max Polyakov and Skype product & operations stars like Carter Adamson, Rodrigo Madanes, Sten Tamkivi, Annemie Rensburg and Michael Jackson
VC and individual investors like DFJ Esprit, Alexander Hoye and Mark Sonne Kharazmi
Experts from companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, SUN, Amazon Web Services, eBay, Oracle, Sky, Albion, Flow Interactive, SparkPR and Blackberry

Gaining the right coverage
Rising above the noise is critical in building your business.

To help Seedcamp teams do this, we've already partnered with Techcrunch, FT.com and the NextWeb Conference. We're now thrilled to announce three new partnerships with:

Ryan Carson's FOWA from Oct 3-5 in London
O'Reillys Web2.0 Expo from Nov 5-8 in Berlin
Loic Le Meur's LeWeb3 from Dec 11-12 in Paris

What's next for Seedcamp....
These are still early days for us. We're at the beginning of a long-term project which is focussed on building a better entrepreneurial environment in Europe for talented entrepreneurs who want to think big.

We've been thrilled by the response so far and the level of engagement from our fellow travelers on our blog, on our forums and on our ever growing public Facebook group. But most of all we've been thrilled to have as our fellow travelers everyone who has applied to Seedcamp and everyone who has become a supporter so far.

We have some exciting ideas for what's next and we really want to hear from you all about what you think we can do to best serve and encourage great talent in Europe.

But right now we're just so excited to move towards the next Act and meet the selected teams for Seedcamp Week 2007 and all the mentors in London from September 3-7th.

Talk at MIT Sloan

2007-08-18T22:47:00.000+01:00

It was great to be back in Boston after so many years and fun to take a trip down memory lane across the road from Firefly.

Some of these slides relating to opportunities outside of the US will be familiar from Nextweb and other thoughts around 3 Os and 5 Cs I've aired in part before - especially last year at Second Chance Tuesday.

Cupcakes deserve serious thought

2007-08-18T22:34:00.000+01:00

More to come...

Michael Eisner loves Spotrunner

2007-08-18T22:30:00.000+01:00

52 hours left to apply for Seedcamp

2007-08-10T19:59:00.000+01:00

Time is running out to apply for Seedcamp, so finish your applications and spread the word.

There are only 52 hours left before the application deadline of midnight GMT on Sunday Aug 12th.

We're thrilled with the amazing response from all over the world with applications from Uruguay to Ukraine, but we want to encourage you all for one final push to try and be one of the 20 companies selected to join us and a killer group of entrepreneurs, investors, product & market gurus in London from September 3rd to 7th.

Good luck -- and if you don't make it this year, were looking to seeing you next year at Seedcamp.

Netlog still bigger than Bebo

2007-07-31T02:23:00.000+01:00

They say Alexa never lies :)

With over 23m registered users and a new service just launched in Turkey, Netlog remains the great undiscovered secret of the Top 100 web.

3 TAG companies in Guardian's Top 10

2007-07-31T01:58:00.000+01:00

Nice to see three TAG companies making the list of Top 10 companies to watch.

Congrats to Moo, Mindcandy and Extate - nice photos :)

Big day for Seedcamp

2007-07-19T22:19:00.000+01:00

from the Seedcamp blog:

We've been thrilled at the interest Seedcamp has generated in such a short time since we announced it a few weeks ago. In the spirit of the new web, we've had some great guest blogs , our forums are slowly getting more active and even our Facebook group is growing like crazy - we're just crossed 600 members :)

We want Seedcamp to really help stimulate a community and conversation around European startups - so please join in, online or physically at your local Opencoffee Club. So if you're an entrepreneur with an idea, a developer with a killer app - there's no excuse to feel alone anymore.

You have until midnight August 12th to submit your completed application, we've already had nearly 100 from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the UK. We've also had applications from India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Latin America - keep them coming.

Seedcamp is completely focussed on supporting the entrepreneur. So we're thrilled that we seemed to have tapped into something that seems relevant and valuable to you. In fact, one of the things which has excited me the most is that people are recognizing that although capital is key, Seedcamp is more about the contacts, coverage and connections successful applicants will receive both in the week of September 3-7 in London and in the 3 months afterwards.

With this in mind, I'm really excited today to announce the first wave of Seedcamp supporters, who are really stepping up to play a major role not just in Seedcamp 2007 but for the years ahead. These are all people and organizations who have played a critical role in putting European entrepreneurship on the map and I'm thrilled to have them on board.

The cast in order of appearance so far are: Index Ventures, Niklas Zennstrom and Mattias Ljungman's Atomico Investments , Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Europe), TAG, Forsyth Group and Brown Rudnick. We are also thrilled to have FT.com and Techcrunch as media partners and the NextWeb Conference as an event partner.

We look forward to act two and announcing our new cast of characters in the coming weeks.

Moo gets sticky

2007-07-19T22:01:00.000+01:00

The team at Moo just can't help coming out with cool stuff. For what seems to be a simple printing company, they have one of the most fanatical followings on the web and a blog which is in the Top 1k on Technorati.

Today, they released their much anticipated third product - StickerBooks.

In true Moo fashion, the product is all about:

personal choice -- you can choose 90 different stickers on 15 tear-out sheets
quality -- stickers are high-quality gloss, scratchproof vinyl stickers
design -- your choice of 6 differently styled beautiful sticker books

Moo are also going to the next level in terms of excellent content with this release.

Now you can choose ReadyMade content some very cool designers and illustrators, in addition to being able to use your Flickr, Habbo, Bebo, Vox, Fotolog or Live Journal content for your MiniCards, NoteCards or StickerBooks.

Well done to the team, hope the party is awesome in London tonight - it certainly seems from Upcoming that there's much excitement.

Why Design Matters....

2007-07-17T21:42:00.000+01:00

There aren't enough great product designers - why?

They make or break today's businesses.

OpenCoffee London keeps growing

2007-07-11T23:22:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow will be our 20th meeting - and our Meetup group in London is now up to 713. Its fantastic to see more people joining and new faces every week.

It's also amazing to me how online groups are becoming so useful and viral - in less than a week Seedcamp's group on Facebook has close to 500 members and the global Opencoffee group on Ning is close to 1,200 people.

What a great way to keep in touch and stay connected - the web gets better every day.

Finding fellow travellers for your business

2007-07-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

A shorter version of my post on the Seedcamp blog about finding partners...

This is some practical advice on what you can do if you have a great idea - for Seedcamp, or otherwise - and you want to go about finding a partner.

It's not easy, but in this age of networks, here are some suggestions which grease the wheels.

You can start easily online:

Check out Seedcamp on Facebook - as it opens up, Groups and associated Events are becoming more powerful as networking tools
Get engaged in Seedcamp Forums - contribute to and check out ours
Use Linkedin - if you know what you're looking for it can be a powerful tool for finding the right people

But there's no substitute for the real world, so:

Opencoffee Club - now in almost 60 cities around the world from Boston to Zagreb. You are likely to be close to one and if not, start one and see who turns up. You'll find you can meet in person co-founders, fellow entrepreneurs and folks to build your team
Barcamp - a really inspiring phenomenon, a place to meet great hackers and people passionate about building products
Meetup - pretty much in every city, you can find experts on most topics, take your pick

Good luck in finding your partners - it's worth it and your business will be better for it.

Openads releases 2.3 beta and appoints CEO

2007-07-05T23:48:00.000+01:00

Openads is really on a roll at the moment.

Congratulations to the team who have just released the public release of their new 2.3 beta which is a major step forward in terms of performance, functionality and ease of use.

And congratulations to James Bilefied, my old colleague from Skype, who was announced yesterday as Openads CEO. James' experience at Yahoo! and Skype makes him a great hire for a business well positioned to disrupt the online advertising space with its free open source ad server.

Exciting times ahead.

Launching Seedcamp

2007-07-03T20:39:00.000+01:00

The covers are coming off - slowly this week, but with increased momentum going forward.

We talked about Seedcamp last week at Library House's conference and now we've soft-launched the web site.

We've been talking about the possibilities since earlier this year and now we're really excited to get the ball rolling.

We're looking for the brightest and the best young entrepreneurs across Europe, Middle East and Africa to blow us away with their ideas for game-changing businesses.

So if you are one of these game-changers, stop now - please apply.

If you'd like to join our network of mentors (entrepreneurs, investors, product designers, developers, lawyers, recruiters, marketing specialists etc) to help support one - let me know personally or in the comments below.

Or, if you're just interested in what we're doing, please check out the presentation below and visit the still in formation Seedcamp.com.

Whatever you do - please spread the word :)

Going to Essential Web event on Wed 27th June

2007-06-25T21:05:00.000+01:00

I'll be going to the Essential Web event this Wednesday at the BFI IMAX.

There are going to be a bunch of interesting companies there, but I'm really interested to see some of the folks who have come along to Opencoffee presenting, including Loudervoice, Yuuguu, Parkatmyhouse.com, Wonga and Extate.com.

Good luck to all of these companies.

If you're going to the event, we're going to be talking a little bit about Seedcamp, so please say hello and hope to see you there :)

Moo and MindCandy in Businessweek

2007-06-25T13:04:00.000+01:00

There is a great cover piece in the latest BusinessWeek, which features Moo and Mindcandy, two innovative and edgy London companies in which TAG and Index were early investors.

Both are great examples are companies appealing and selling to a global audience based out a European city. The piece also talks about Joost based in Luxembourg and FON based in Madrid. Of course there are a legion of other European consumer Internet stars making waves worldwide like Netvibes, Bebo, Habbo, Stardoll, Last.fm and not forgetting Skype.

Its really exciting to see European companies making a global splash being recognized by mainstream US media - long may it continue.

Daylife from NYC raises $8m from LON

2007-06-25T12:47:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Upe and the team at Daylife for closing their latest funding round.

They brought on some really great investors: Ynon Kreiz joining the team from the newly named Balderton (formerly Benchmark Europe) and Adam Valkin from Arts Alliance. TAG was an early seed investor.

This is a great stepping stone for the business and should really help the team bring their platform for news to a much wider partner base and more international market.

There is great coverage in today's FT, which highlights the interesting angle of a US company coming to London for funding.

The Red Herring noted something similar in their coverage of Opencoffee Club last week and with London is becoming a hub for early-stage, its great to see this being picked up.

Openads raises $5m for free opensource ad server

2007-06-13T08:26:00.000+01:00

Openads, has announced in the last few hours that Index have led a $5m funding round to build out the product and expand the team. The round includes investment from Mangrove, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, O'Reilly and TAG.

The core Openads team is based in London, is another great example of an interesting European startup, which has manage to exist under the radar screen, quietly creating a geographically diverse business with a commanding position online.

Openads develops free, open source ad-serving software which publishers use to manage the advertising on their websites. It has all the features a publisher would expect from an ad server but at a fraction of the cost of alternatives -- free.

In fact, in a world where so much focus has been placed on advertiser needs the team at Openads has really aimed squarely at understanding the needs of small and medium-sized publishers who want to make more moeny from their website.

Openads is already used by more than 25,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, in fact it has more installations than all competing ad serving solutions combined.

The geographical footprint is very reminiscent of Skype to me -- very strong in the US, but equally present in some of the web's most established (Western Europe) and fastest growing markets (China, Russia, Brazil and Poland).

We're really excited to be working with the team at Openads, who have built a very simple, feature rich and easy to use product that publishers across the world clearly love using. Publishers are having their business squeezed across the board and taking away the cost of ad serving so publishers can focus on raising their effective CPMs is a winning proposition.

There's already been some good coverage already on the blogs - at Mashable, Techcrunch and Buzzmachine.

Opencoffee breaks 55 cities

2007-06-13T01:14:00.000+01:00

Opencoffee Club is now in over 55 cities - wow!

We're only 15 weeks in and we're now spanning the globe from Athens to Anchorage, and 53 places in between. London's group on Meetup has now passed 600 members.

There's lots of interesting things going on, so please check the forums on our online meeting point and if you've seen it take a look at Read/Write/Web's great piece on the Opencoffee movement.

I'd love to know how you think we can evolve, improve Opencoffee - so please met me know in the comments below or by mail.

Nextweb in Amsterdam

2007-06-13T00:57:00.000+01:00

I know I've been slow in posting but wanted to share the slides from the talk I gave a few weeks back in Amsterdam at the really enjoyable NextWeb conference.

The theme was about stimulating more great European entrepreneurship - something which is close to my heart and I've posted about at length before.

In the last few weeks we have seen more great news for European startups - including the great team at Last.fm's fabulous exit to CBS and also Joost attracting Mike Volpi, one of the killer executives from Silicon Valley, to come to London to build what promises to be a company ready to redefine TV.

Who says Europe isn't at the cutting edge?

Joost invites for OpenCoffee members

2007-05-28T19:18:00.001+01:00

Joost invites have been in limited supply in the blogosphere but the nice folks at Joost have kindly added OpenCoffee Club to the illustrious ranks of Techcrunch and opened a front door for OCC members to try out the service. Check it out here.

Last week was a busy week for OCC, we had great coverage on Read/Write/Web and there are now over 45 locations around the world holding events including now in Anchorage, Alaska :)

Please send me any great OCC stories, I'd like to showcase some of them when I talk about OpenCoffee later this week at Nextweb in Amsterdam.

Moo adds Vox, Live Journal & Fotolog

2007-05-23T22:11:00.000+01:00

Moo is on a roll, like all interesting brands online they are starting to generate spinoffs and real passion.

The major players in the blogosphere are starting to take notice about their innovative products and business model.

Now, they are adding Vox, Livejournal and Fotolog to their already impressive roster of big brand online partners like Bebo, Flickr and Habbo.

If you're not a member of one those you can always upload or design your own images.

Showcase for Early Stage European start ups

2007-05-21T11:27:00.000+01:00

Library House, the folks who cover the UK and increasingly the European venture scene are going to be holding a one day event on 27th June in London which they bill as "a one-day showcase celebrating Europe’s web innovators".

The interesting thing about this event is that Library House is looking to showcase not just established companies like WAYN and Shozu, but also new upcoming companies which have not been funded.

I'll be on a panel and going along, as I suspect will a number of other entrepreneurs and investors. If you're an early stage European entrepreneur you should check it out - you can apply here.

OpenCoffee London closes in on Vampires

2007-05-20T21:49:00.000+01:00

It's been great to see OpenCoffee spread to over 35 locations across the world in the last 3 months since we first started off in London.

Europe is starting to be covered and in the last week, we've seen the boundaries extend to include Tel Aviv and Slovenia coming online this week, along with our first entries in Italy and Germany.

In recent weeks we've also heard about Sydney, Cape Town and Toronto really taking off. While there are new OpenCoffee's opening almost every week in the US with new locations now in Austin, Memphis and North Virginia.

We're now up to 525 members for our London group on Meetup, which I'm happy to say puts us in the Top 20 groups for London. That is until I realized we're still 2 people behind the London Vampires group.

Come on London, let's get ahead of the Vampires (527) - next up the much tougher challneges of Biking & Adventure Hiking (620), and maybe one day Poker (937).

Maybe we'll have passed the Vampires by the time you read this :)

Learn more about AdWords

2007-05-20T21:30:00.000+01:00

Figuring out how to best use Google AdWords is a key job for any entrepreneur, so it's great to see businesses popping up trying to make it as easy as possible.

Toby Mason, one of the co-founders of Zootrain, has been kind enough to offer folks reading this blog and members of London's now thriving OpenCoffee Club a £100 off voucher to a Zootrain seminar.

If you haven't tried AdWords and want to know how this could be a great offer. Use voucher code skpub14 to qualify and thank Toby if you go along.

First International OpenCoffee Club -- May 31 in Amsterdam

2007-05-07T21:15:00.000+01:00

Patrick, Arjen and Boris are the inspirational guys behind TheNextWeb, which promises to be a great conference in Amsterdam. They are also the force behind Amsterdam OpenCoffee Club.

They've lined up some of the luminaries of the blogosphere to speak including Mike Arrington, Jason Calcanis and Scott Rafer. Plus some very cool new European startups who will be showcasing what they're up to. I'll also be around saying a few words about OpenCoffee and the ever improving climate for entrepreneurs in Europe.

But perhaps most fun of all, before NextWeb kicks off, they are also hosting the world's first International OpenCoffee Club which will be held on Thursday May 31 from 4-6pm in Amsterdam. I'll be there, so looking forward to meeting some of you in person as well.

New Location for London OpenCoffee

2007-05-07T20:48:00.000+01:00

Thanks so much to Walid and the guys at TrustedPlaces, we have an excellent new venue for London OpenCoffee Club.

Starting from this Thursday, every 10-12, we'll be having London OpenCoffee at the very cool 5th View Bar at the top of Waterstone's at 203-206 Piccadily. See the Trustedplaces review here.

The view is awesome and best of all we'll be able to have FREE wifi, so please bring along your demos and if you don't feel like chatting feel free to work.

we have over 450 members to our London Meetup group and there are now around 33 locations hosting OpenCoffee Clubs around the world - so check them out at our OpenCoffee site and join in the global conversation.

Hope to see you in London very soon.

Netlog is getting bigger than Bebo

2007-05-03T22:07:00.001+01:00

Last week, Facebox relaunched as Netlog. The company also announced that it had taken in €5m in its first investment round from Index, Atomico and TAG.

Everyone's heard of MySpace and Bebo, but Netlog's 18m members in 8 languages is really one of the great untold stories of the web right now. Not many people would have thought Netlog has more reach than Bebo, but it does....

Focussing on local markets, the talented entrepreneurs and the team behind Netlog have quietly been building a profitable business from their base in Belgium which is now Europe's biggest, most diverse social network. It's worth keeping a close eye on how they keep developing.

Can Moo become Hallmark 2.0?

2007-04-20T17:34:00.000+01:00

There is no doubt that the greetings cards business is an enormous one. Hallmark has dominated it for years with their top-down approach to creating content for every occasion you might want to express love, congratulations, good wishes and everything in between. In 2006, they did over $4bn in revenue.

It's a pretty good business to be in - there are greeting cards on sale all over the world, all at a pretty high price point. Enter Moo.

Having redefined the humdrum business card with their super-cool MiniCards, which has drawn a fanatical following on the web finding cool use for MiniCards like magnets and keyrings, as well as accessories.

Now Moo is redefining the way we can send greetings to people with the launch of NoteCards.

NoteCards let you upload your Flickr photos or any design onto a uniquely shaped greetings card. They come beautifully delivered with envelopes so you can start bringing a personal touch into your personal greetings.

Give it a try, I promise you'll love it and start dreaming of ways to bring Hallmark's one-size fits all model of greetings to their knees.

South Africa 5 years on

2007-04-19T20:19:00.000+01:00

Given where it was coming from - years of apartheid - I always felt that you needed to cut South Africa some slack in terms of its development goals. Now, having just been there again it's really struck me how much has developed in even the last 5 years since I wrote this post.

Traffic used to be a word you barely ever heard in South Africa - such great roads and so few people who could afford cars but now Johannesburg is packed with cars. Buildings are going up everywhere, smart office buildings and business parks stretch from Sandton through Four Ways and up to Mid Rand - the economy and the stock markets are booming.

South Africa has always had extremely strong mining companies and in recent years SAB has become a global force in brewing. But there are several really strong businesses being grown from Joburg now, including two of Africa's largest cell phone operators - Vodacom and MTN - and several very strong banks including ABSA (recently acquired by Barclays for £3bn) and Standard Bank. Investec has been a phenomenal success story in the last 5 years as well.

There are great retail businesses like Truworths, Pick'n'Pay and Nandos has taken its brand of fast-casual food global. In technology great businesses have been built like Dimension Data, Thawte (bought by Verisign) and now Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are making major waves in the open source community.

There has been a lot of talent which has left South Africa and been instrumental in building some great businesses Web businesses like Elon Musk (PayPal) and Roelof Botha (PayPal, YouTube). Douglas at Extate has started his business in the UK but has produced a South African version as well. Many have stayed (or left roots behind) and are building important projects and some great businesses. There is a thriving Internet scene in South Africa - in fact today marks Cape Town's first OpenCoffee Club meeting.

One of South Africa's hidden jewels is also Naspers. This is probably one of the most interesting media companies on the planet right now, not just because of how much they are dominating their home markets but mainly because of their strategy which drives a super imaginative and shrewd approach to investing in the Internet. This company most people have never heard of are quietly building a portfolio of some of the most incredible Internet assets in emerging markets including 36% of Tencent (QQ is a phenomenon) and a recent acquisition of 30% of Mail.ru.

China and Russia - as well as Africa - are markets experiencing hypergrowth. For all our railing on Africa, there are a million new cellphone customer signing up a week. Europe is often a strange, strange land to US companies and investing outside the mainstream in emerging markets is even scarier but going to places, off the beaten track, but where there is high growth is great strategy.

South Africa is hosting the World Cup in 2010 - not 5 years this time to wait, but its going to fascinating to see the growth between now and then and also perhaps the realization in the rest of the world that Africa, and South Africa, is more than just rugby, cricket, amazing nature and wildlife, but is starting to produce some economic world champions as well.

Google pays $3.1bn for some key relationships

2007-04-15T21:20:00.000+01:00

In buying Doubleclick, Google has not just taken the plunge and going very hard after the display advertising space but bought in some of the web's longest standing advertiser and publishers relationships not to say an enormous amount of critical data.

Google's move is very aggressive and expensive, but also very smart. Doubleclick may have had less compelling technology than many others, including Atlas but its relationships are second to none.

Although there is so much change and innovation going on in the advertising space right now between services like Spotrunner, Feedburner, Tacoda, Videoegg and Quigo - relationships still count for more than anything in themarketing services world.

There's been lots of coverage and conjecture in the blogosphere about the motivations (see Om, Mike, John Battelle and Steve Rubel) and Google has covered the deal extensively on their blogs.

This is going to be very interesting as online advertising continues to eat share of the overall marketing budget, Microsoft, Yahoo, News Corp (MySpace), Time Warner (AOL) and any other media owner who depends on advertising revenue will need to think twice as hard now about how to effectively compete with Google's advertising machine.

OpenCoffee keeps rolling - now in 23 locations, 6 new this week

2007-04-12T20:43:00.000+01:00

We had another great OpenCoffee Club in London today with well over 50 people coming over the 2 hours. Its nice to see many regulars from both the investing (Mattias at Atomico), developer (Damien at New Bamboo) and entrepreunerial (Paul at Cominded) community starting to connect on a regular basis and in such an informal and constrcutive way.

There are some really interesting young entrepreneurs in London at the moment and they were some great new apps being demoed including Joel Selvadurai who was showing folks his cool people directory for finding bloggers who Skype.

Sumon Sadhu (happy birthday) and Peter Nixey were also around -- they both have some interesting new ideas up their sleeves as well for us to look out for.

The group on London OpenCoffee group on the very excellent Meetup has reached over 300 members and the Ning social network is becoming quite active as well, pulling together the now 23 OpenCoffee locations around the world.

New locations this week include:

Pittsburgh - organized by Alan Veeck
Lisbon - organized by Ricardo Saramago
Portland - organized by Ben Strackany
Toronto - organized by the excellent Jonas Brandon, who has also helped to create the start of an OCC wiki
Sydney - organized by Kim
Seattle - organized by serial entrepreneur and blogger Andy Sack

Patrick is also going to be hosting the first International OpenCoffee Club after the NextWeb Conference on June 2nd in Amsterdam.

There are also plans afoot this week to take OpenCoffee to Houston and even Second Life.

The collective energy around OpenCoffee has been amazing, it's really encouraging to see people involved in the startup scene responding so positively to the notion of informal get togethers.

At the moment, we've seen it work best with a no pressure environment and the right combination of developers, investors and entrepreneurs - keep pushing for the right mix in your local market and if the VCs don't come, let them know what they're missing :)

Extate continues to think different

2007-04-12T15:08:00.000+01:00

True to form, the team at Extate continues to think different.

Some of their novelties include video listings, mortgage and square-foot calculations and recently a service for the South African market.

Now, they have done a very cool implementation of property maps which addresses many of the issues typically associated with the traditional property site meets Google Maps mash up.

While they have not blown away the field in terms of Alexa rankings, I'm continually impressed by the team's smarts and desire to create new and compelling user experiences.

Thankfully they have done at least one thing conventional -- they now have a blog :)

Stardoll makes it to E! News

2007-04-05T20:06:00.000+01:00

Stardoll has become a worldwide phenomenon.

It's an online celebrity dress up and community site for everyone who likes fashion and celebrities. There are now nearly 6.5m members, mostly girls between the ages of 7 and 17.

Check out what E! News has to say about it...

Index leads $18m round in Ozon.ru

2007-04-04T21:40:00.000+01:00

Russia is one of the fastest growing online markets and Ozon is the "Amazon of Russia" and one of its largest Internet companies.

As part of a broader approach to investing in Eastern Europe, Index has led a round of $18m, alongside Cisco and Holtzbrinck, to help Ozon drive growth. Giuseppe Zocco will be leading for Index.

There's great coverage of the deal and the market at eConsultancy and also alarm:clock.

Three New OpenCoffee Clubs and more planned

2007-04-04T20:04:00.000+01:00

OpenCoffee Club keep spreading and this week there are three new and really exciting locations opening up.

Nicholas Butterworth, the man behind Sonicnet and the first incarnation of MTVi is going to be hosting New York's OpenCoffee Club - it should draw a great crowd together and hopefully will turn into a superb hub.

Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld from Mobius are opening up Boulder's OpenCoffee Club. These are the guys behind Askthevc.com and are two of the most prolific and productive VC bloggers online - it should be a great event.

The very cool Lundkenner crew have kicked off OpenCoffee Club in Copenhagen with Mark Sonne Kharazmi taking the lead. Morton was an early influencer in Skype and these guys have a great attitude and a seriously creative spirit - so if you're ever in Copenhagen, don't miss out.

This week, I've also heard plans for OpenCoffee Clubs in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pittsburgh, Sao Paolo and Sydney.

The community at OpenCoffeeclub.org is also growing fast - it's nearly at 200 now - so join in online or at one of the 20 or so cities hosting events weekly.

This Thursday I'm in France on a week's break so I'll be missing the London event, but if last week was anything to go by there'll be an excellent blend of entrepreneurs, investors and developers. See you next week in London.