Closing in on Seedcamp Week 2007

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.

Last.fm signs deal with Warner Music Group

Congrats to last.fm who just announced its first content agreement with a major label.

The deal will let Last.fm's rapidly growing community have access to Warner's amazing roster of artists through their free streaming radio service and tee up a premium subscription radio service.

Last.fm is growing like crazy, with over 15m monthly active users now experiencing the joys of discovering new music through the recommendations of other community members. Making it easy for people to access major label content will only make the service more valuable to its users and easier for labels to promote both new and catalogue product to consumers - so great news for everyone.


This service is particularly close to my heart (and not just because I am a small investor) as I've been dabbling in the entertainment recommendations space for over ten years now.

First with Firefly, where we launched the web's first music recommendation service (later sold to Launch, now Yahoo Music) and then again with Video Island (now Lovefilm) where we applied similar principles to movie recommendations to build Europe's largest online DVD rental service.

There is no doubt that at Firefly we were way too early and the Internet was too immature a medium for the real power of recommendations to take off, but in the last ten years both Amazon and Netflix have done an amazing job popularizing collaborative filtering and making recommendations a central plank of consumer discovery.

Amazon has elevated the application of datamining to help consumers decide what products to buy to an art form. Netflix values the approach so much it's offered a $1m prize to anyone who can improve their approach to movie discovery.

More often than not the weapons of datamining have been wielded by companies on behalf of companies - they mined to see how to sell more. Companies in the future will put these weapons to work for consumers.

Last.fm is at one of the new businesses at the vanguard of taking discovery to the next level.

One thing which is particularly nice about their approach is the fact that through their scrobbling software (which attaches to your media player), they make it so easy for you to contribute to and benefit from the rest of the community.

We wrestled with the earliest applications of social information filtering at Firefly and one of the big challenges was always about how to best motivate explicit (ie. a rating) and weight implicit (ie. an observed behaviour) data. There is no doubt implicit data collection is much easier on the user, it takes no time, all you have to do is agree to be observed and feel comfortable that in return your information will get great value and your privacy will be protected. Nic Brisbourne has an interesting post on this subject.

Last.fm works because people trust the service to watch what they are listening to they get discover new things -- clearly this works beautifully with music, but there is no doubt with the emergence of other digitally based services we will see more and more of this paradigm. My old friend Seth Goldtsein, as usual, is really pushing the envelope here with his work on Attention Trust and Roots Market.

side note: another cool thing about last.fm is their integration with Skype. All the communications service (Skype, Google, AIM, Yahoo! and Messenger) are now opening up to 3rd parties here are going to be amazing opportunities to build great application on top of platforms which come with presence, contacts, voice, IM and video built in. What an amazing platform for new applications to be built around.

Like with Last.fm, obviously this can work with people's explicit knowledge with video (think where Joost can go) and it is already working to some degree without people's knowledge in online advertising and the current vogue for behavioural targeting.

We are scratching the surface of how we will be able to leverage the computational power now available to us for the analysis of vast swathes of comples data to benefit consumers and help them improve their decisions. One of the best examples of a service helping people make better decisions through the application of hard core math and computation is Farecast -- delivering an amazingly valuable view of airfare information to help people decide when to buy tickets.

Congratulations to Last.fm for showing the tip-of-the-iceberg to 15m people. I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.