Moo launches business cards

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!
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Moo makes a splash on YouTube

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

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.

It's a big day for Open Source

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.

Stardolls starts to showcase DKNY and Sephora

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.

Netlog still bigger than Bebo

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.

Big day for Seedcamp

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

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.

Openads releases 2.3 beta and appoints CEO

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.

Openads raises $5m for free opensource ad server

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.

Joost invites for OpenCoffee members

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.

Netlog is getting bigger than Bebo

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?

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.

Stardoll makes it to E! News

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

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.

Physical measurements of Web 2.0

There's a great piece on Moo from News.com.

"If you ever wondered, the physical measurements of Web 2.0 are 28 by 70 millimeters.

It happens that those are the measurements of Moo cards, a new take on the centuries-old business card that's becoming the "secret handshake" of the Web 2.0 set."

Moo has really started to motor with partnerships with some of the coolest barnds on the web like Flickr, Bebo, Second Life and Habbo - plus this week the web's photosharing leviathan, Fotolog has joined the ranks.

You can even now start uploading your own designs to put onto your MiniCards.


People are passionate about Moo and as it catches on among the digerati its fans are finding new ways to express themselves using the super cool cards.

Lovefilm starts TV ads

Lovefilm is obviously close to me heart and I'm thrilled that it's doing really well.

It is by far the largest online DVD rental player in Europe with operations in UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Germany.

The brand is moving into the mainstream and after years of successful online and direct marketing, the UK business has just started advertising on TV. See if you can recognize the voice...

Moo takes Habbo & Second Life offline

We live more and more of out lives online these days - sharing photos, creating homepages, living in virtual worlds. Lucky Moo lets us take this digital life and bring back into the real world.

Moo is on a tear at the moment - having just launched partnership with Bebo, now members of Habbo and Second Life can make cute little cards to share their online identities with people.


If you haven't tried Moo, give it spin - I love the Flickr partnership which lets me point my Flickr photostream and create super cool personalized cards.

Check out what people are doing with it.

Ben's presentation on VC Funding at FOWA

Ryan Carson and many others were real fans of Ben's presentation on VC funding at FOWA - even one of the Slideshare founders loved it :)

So thanks to Ben, here it is:



There's no doubt the process of getting funding (from anyone, let alone VCs) can be pretty complicated and nontransparent, but this is a great presentation which really cuts to the chase and explains the basics.

Fred Destin and Nic Brisbourne in the UK and Brad Feld, David Hornick and Fred Wilson in the US also do a great job on their blogs of making VC more accessible. There is also a new resource worth checking out calling Startupping.

Having been an entrepreneur who raised money from VCs at Firefly and Lovefilm and an angel investor backing entrepreneurs (Spotrunner, Daylife, Moo, Mindcandy etc) in both the US and Europe and now that I'm working with a VC firm, I completely agree with Ben's view that VC funding may not right for every business but where it makes sense it can make a big difference.

If you have any questions on funding, please post comments and if I know I'll answer and if not I'll try get you answers. If you're an entrepreneur in London come along to an OpenCoffee club or start one locally and try persuade your local VCs to come along and see what they're missing :)

Joining Index Ventures

Today it was announced that I joined Index Ventures as a Venture Partner and even though it has been rumored otherwise, I'm still delighted to remain involved with Skype and PayPal doing some strategic projects.

I’m really excited to be working with Index - and not just because they've just announced a new €350m fund. I've known and respected Danny since Firefly, Netscape and Link Exchange, Microsoft days. Subsequently I've had the good fortune to work with the Index team as entrepreneur (Video Island), exec (Skype) and co-investor (Moo, Stardoll etc)

I'm also really excited to be working in Europe (see previous post). European funds are finally being recognized as some of the top-rated globally - and Index is seen as one of the best. Europe is also finally developing the talent, role models and infrastructure to compete globally, in fact some of the most innovative entrepreneurs and ideas are coming out of Europe now, especially the Nordics and Eastern Europe.

A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t just stay an active angel when TAG has made over ten investments in early stage investments over the last few years - including Daylife, edgeio, Spotrunner and Stardoll. Angels play a vital role for many successful start ups but I can’t name one company that hit it big globally on angel money alone. Times are good now, but when the going gets tough, growing companies need experienced and connected partners to help navigate global competition.

If you’re thinking of starting a company or have an idea and don’t know where to start, please feel free to contact me [saul at indexventures dot com] or leave a comment on the blog.