Entries by Alan Patrick

Today is a day that comes round once a century - 11/11/11 (And the US and UK calendars actually are in line too). It is also the day when the the Great War ended, and we choose to remember the dead on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which was when the guns stopped shooting and it was all quiet on the Western Front.

For a while.

George Santayana noted that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". As well as remembering those who fell, its also worth also rembering why another war started on the Western Front, especially in 2011. After World War One there was a time of conspicuous consumption, and then a Great Depression. During the Great Depression, the Ordinary Man was essentially mugged financially by the bankers and capitalists of that era while the state stood by or colluded. The net effect was to push the desperate Ordinary Man to vote for autocratic, populist regimes in many countries, even in the USA the New Deal was a major swing towards the Powerful State. It is now in danger of happening again.

After WW2 a new social compact was formed in the West, with State tax and spending forcing a trickle down from rich to poor to reduce wealth disparity. That compact has largely disappeared, the wealth gap has been in reverse for about 20 years (back to pre WW1 / WW2 levels worryingly), and the rump is now being increasingly rapidly rescinded. Despite being bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, the banks have not changed their behaviour at all - if anything it has got worse as they now know they won't be asked to pick up any mess they create. At least in the 1930's the US Government had the fortitude to bring in the Glas Steagal Act to separate "normal" banking from casino banking. In 2011 no government has had the balls. So 2008 will likely happen again, soon.

Unelected governments are now in power in Greece and Italy, Europe is now essentially being run by a cadre of unelected Technocrats, democratic process is being flouted left right and centre. In the UK the tax burden on the Ordinary Man is being ramped up, as subsidies are cut, in parallel with reducing tax burdens on the rich and corporate sectors.The tent cities in St Paul's and elsewhere are little different to the early protests of the 1930's, and mark the phase when most citizens still trusted their governments to act in their interests. The next steps, when people stopped trusting their Governments, are far worse - in the 1930's that directly led to the guns opening up on the Western Front again. We have been here before, the tragedy is if we don't remember it now, we will repeat it.

One of the big differences between now and then is modern comms technology that returns power to people - as the Arab Spring has shown, electronic comms can greatly empower the weak people vs the strong vested interests. Little surprise therefore that the strong are now arguing hard to restrict access to technology in tough times (eg shut down the Internet when there are riots). Hitler silenced his opposition by burning the Reichstag and blaming it on the Communists. Our role, in the Tech community, is to be very wary of useful public and democratic assets and rights being removed, and the removal being blamed on phantom "enemies of the state" or "economic necessities" - muslim fundamentalists, evil rioters, big bailout bazookas etc etc. And to speak out for these digital freedoms, because pressure to give them up is only going to intensify, and will come from all sorts of seemingly innocent and worthy angles.

So, while we remember the dead this year, it's not just 1918 and 1945 we must not forget, Its 1930 - 39 we also must remember now.

Interesting article by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch EU on Tech blogging in Europe - the times, he says, are a-changing:

Now, in 2011, the scene and perhaps the economics, are starting to change. The tech scene itself is bigger, there is more potential money around. There’s just more heat. I daresay a few people are eyeing up the market.

But even in standalone media terms it’s not a ‘straight’ play. Most of the European tech blogs are either run by people who also consult on the side, or, as in the case of TheNextWeb, are attached, like a Pilot Fish to a their host shark, to a large annual conference. However, recently, a couple of things have changed.

Other big guns have parked their tanks on the European lawn. GigaOm now has a European writer, Bobbie Johnson (based in Brighton), so does WSJ Europe (Ben Rooney, in London), VentureBeat has Ciara Byrne in Amsterdam and The Next Web (especially with Martin Bryant in Manchester) has done a pretty good job internationalising in English (although good luck trying to monetize that Dutch language blog guys). Wired UK‘s magazine’s site has become an important adjunct to the print title. Some might say it’s already the ‘Vanity Fair’ of tech. So, leaving aside the economics of online publishing, in editorial terms alone, pan-European coverage of tech and startups has never been better.

I do hope the economics change - we are that classic "Consultancy-with-a-blog" model Mike mentions above, in 2006 we felt that you had to put your mouth where your money was (or in blogging's case, wasn't...) and actually use the technology we were consulting on. We have certainly learned a lot from blogging and the blog has led to some interesting assignments and opportunities indirectly, and forged some good friendships, but it has certainly not been a profitable endeavour - we see it very much as a marketing cost. In fact, we took a bit of a hiatus this summer because we were so darn busy with client work!

It's interesting that the US blogs now have a "European Foreign Correspondent" too, so lets see, maybe Mike is right. Our own observation is that there are only 3 scenes in Europe that are really worth keeping an eye on - London, Berlin and the European emigres to Silicon Valley (with maybe Paris deserving the occasional glance as a 4th) as pretty much anything happening in Europe will wash up in one of these nets. Most of the running is still very US centric.

Mike also wants to see more attitude...well, Broadstuff has always been a tad, well, satirical - Bubblewatch has been this year's running joke - In fact more than one person has told us we could never get Ads owing to that Broadsnark. We are quite proud of that actually

So clearly we may even be on the right track.

I remember seeing the first Apple microcomputer, and realising the guys who built it were a step ahead of anyone else. What is amazing is how Apple has kept that step ahead for 40 years, and that is no accident. Many people claim to "change the world", Steve Jobs was one of the select band who did - and in a positive way.

What is astounding is that he has been making technology easy to use for all those 40 years, and many of his competitors still don't "get" it!

(Update ...this does not mean Mr Jobs - like any genius - did not have flaws, or was not difficult to work with, of course)

Amazon has launched a demi-tablet to not compete with the Apple iPad - The Omnivore has a good synopsis:

Unlike a wave of other tablets that have emerged hopefully only to flop, such as the HP TouchPad, the Motorola Xoom, and the RIM PlayBook, the Kindle Fire has a good shot at turning the newest theater of war in high-tech into a two-tablet battle. With a 7-inch display, the Fire is about half the size of the iPad. At $199, it’s also less than half the price of the cheapest Apple model. Amazon has painted over the rough surfaces of Google‘s Android operating system with a fresh and easy-to-use interface and tied the device closely to its own large and growing content library. Kindle Fire owners can watch the film Rio, scroll through magazines such as The New Yorker or Esquire, and access their music collection on Amazon’s servers.

“What we are doing is offering premium products at non-premium prices,” Bezos says. Other tablet contenders “have not been competitive on price” and “have just sold a piece of hardware. We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service.”

Its not an iPad in other words - its not a premium product, its smaller screened, cheaper and (knowing Android) probably nastier to operate - so its a mass market play that hopes to be a Good Enough for most of the rest of the (non iPad owning) market.

We have done quite a lot of work for clients inthe e-reader/tablet supply chain, and the one thing that drives success - time and again, as for all devices - is a good variety of content. It took Google a long time to get this in Androidworld, but Amazon has the best chance of taking Apple on of all the players (as they showed with Kindle).

So, an early hypothesis from me - Apple will probably continue to sell high margin, high class product to the 20% at the top of the tablet market (as they have done since the 1970's in every market). Amazon will be mopping up the low margin mass market. The fact that Microsoft, the arch mass-market mop-up player, is underpinning the Fire's OS is another pointer to this.

No doubt there will be a bigger Fire soon, but no doubt Apple will also be innovating. They could launch a prodcuct that is half-way between the iPad and iPhone in a fairly short time we suspect - maybe call it the iPhad

Marc Andreessen thinks that the clock is ticking on Oracle and other old-line software and infrastructure companies - Business Insider.

His evidence: not a single one of Andreessen-Horowitz's startup investments use Oracle software. They all use cloud-based alternatives instead.

............

"Ten years ago, it was a joke: you'd raise $20 million in venture capital and write a $4 or $5 million check to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC....When it started, Salesforce looked like a toy compared with Siebel. Look ahead five years later, it's obviously better. Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle."

The thing was that Oracle, BEA, EMC - and even Sun - were not appropriate for startups even 10 years ago, and everyone knew it - but you had to "look big fast" in the high hype world of dotcom share price pimping - and every dotcom with attitude was going to be huge in 2 years, of course - so get the Big Boy systems in now rather than buy a decent SME accounts package now and buy Oracle later when you were bigger. Brave indeed was the dotcom startup who went for the appropriate technology, therefore . What Marc also doesn't mention is that many times these large companies would give you the kit on some sort of for-shares or low interest long life loan basis, so you would be financially daft not to take it.

My main issue with Oracle (and the other big players by and large) is that they have done little in the last 10 years to redress that known weakness - and you would have thought Sun's demise would be a lesson. They saw Hosted solutions coming 10 years ago, so this cannot be a surprise - and thus why no action?

The reason is the fairly standard large company issue - addiction to the current business models, and finding it very hard to invest in new technologies that don't "move the needle" and are unreliable by "tried and trusted" standards. In fact, Oracle innovation has typically been "buying the market" as its innovation ploy - either buying out sector competitors, or small companies with interesting products - and then sadly (and probably even unintentionally) slowly strangling them by underinvesting and burying them in corporate treacle.

(This was part of Marc's argument that there Is No Bubble- he believes the cloud computing revolution has made the titanic valuations of major Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Twitter completely justified - which we just don't buy)

So my prediction is slightly different to Marc's - I would predict that as the Cloud market grows, and becomes more stable, then Oracle, SAP, IBM et al will increasingly just buy their way in. Give it 3 years or so, and Marc's investments will be using Oracle

And as totitanic valuations being justified, we shall see.....

When Web 2.0 broke out in the mid noughties, Deli.cio.us was one of the main services pointed to as part of the New Wave. Now it has been resurrected. What is more interesting is who the the owners are - Liz Gannes on alt.hings.D

New owners Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (a.k.a. the creators of YouTube) have ported Delicious over from previous owner Yahoo, and are ready to show their first revision to the public.

Expectations aren’t terrifically high for the new Delicious, given the rareness of tech comeback stories and the fact that Delicious was never really that popular. But we can’t help but watch, given Hurley and Chen’s magic touch at YouTube.

As Liz says, this was not eventually a major part of the Web 2.0 movement (though it has its own dedicated following) and was bought by Yahoo, who essentially strangled it before selling it on for a song.

Far be it for us to suggest that this goose is being fattened up for the Bubbletime....and postulate how many other defunct mid-noughties brands will become Laz.ar.Us brands....

A few years ago we collaborated in a piece of work for NESTA on the extraordinary innovation that US companies formed in the Depression showed. It seems that being born and surviving in that cauldron gave them an extraordinary resilience. Hewlett Packard (HP) was one of them, and was mentioned (along with quite a few of the other Depression era companies) in the 1982 book In Search of Excellence. Sadly along with many others, inclusion in that book was a sort of death knell.

HP has had a tough last 15 years or so, and has had a succession of unfortunate CEO choices. Now its just been confirmed that Meg Whitman (ex eBay) is the new CEO - AllThingsD:

The board of HP, which has had its own series of blunders in recent years, is hoping Whitman can help turn that around, especially as its competitors — such as Oracle, IBM and others — increase the pressure.

Whitman herself will need a lot of help. She has had a successful career in the consumer Internet space, but has little experience in enterprise and hardware, which are at the heart of HP’s big businesses. Among the most immediate issues to deal with: Coming up with a clear strategic plan; reevaluating Apotheker’s move to spin off its consumer PC business and shutter its webOS device development; reassuring rattled employees and restoring morale; and, most of all, calming disgruntled shareholders and getting the stock moving in an upward direction.

Other than that, Mrs. Whitman…

Good luck....she will certainly need it! Will this end a run of unfortunate CE choices? I'm not particulalrly optimistic as apart from her (in)experience in this space, this is a long mismanagede company in a decining industry, to pull out of and it seems to me that the HP board - which surely must be seen by now as a major liability - is still in situ. Still, if a biscuit hustler* could pull IBM around, there is hope for HP.

*I haven't done any research on this, but I wonder if there is a higher success rate for bringing in CEOs from outsuide the industry - I have certainly found it works well at middle and senior management level.

News today that Ning managed a $200m all-stock sale to Glam Media - AllThingsD:

Glam Media, a social content platform for sites primarily targeting women, said it’s buying Ning, the custom social-platform start-up co-founded by Marc Andreessen. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but sources close to the deal said the sale price was $200 million, mostly in stock. Glam has been eyeing an initial public offering, so shares being part of the deal is not a surprise. I had reported in August that Ning was on the block and had been talking to a number of companies, including Google and Groupon. The sale price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning, which topped $750 million several years ago. Its venture funders have put close to $120 million into the company since it was founded in 2004.

Timing is everything, Ning was an early-generation SocNet that didn't sell at the time its contemporaries like Bebo, MySpace et al did, and has been superseded by next-generation ones. This is a face saving sale for the Ning founders and a part of Glam's "pump up the volume" of traffic pre IPO.

But this capitulation by the Ning founders also points to early signs of a deflation in The Bubble - Groupon has pulled its IPO (to be seen when it has another shot), and Facebook has now been pushed back for another year. Be interesting to see what Zynga does, given it is another of the recent Tech darlings that has recently filed a $1bn IPO.

If the last Tech Bubble is anything to go by, there will be a series of deflations like this followed by increased inflations in this one. Too early to all this deflation, but definitely a reduction in inflation.

Update - contra indications to a still infalting bubbleworld - an Incubator's Incubator! (hat tip @bobbiejohnson)

From TechCrunch itself - AOL has issued the following statement:

“The TechCrunch acquisition has been a success for AOL and for our shareholders, and we are very excited about its future. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund. Michael is a world-class entrepreneur and we look forward to supporting his new endeavor through our investment in his venture fund. Erick Schonfeld has been named the editor of TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months.”

But Mr Arrington is still hosting TecgCrunch Disrupt, it seems - interviewing Doug Leone from Sequoia among other activities. But as to the new Arrington vehicle, startup fund Crunchfund, even Seqoia is pointing out its a me too in the Bubbletimes - from PEHub:

Asked by Arrington if Sequoia would squeeze a new fund like his out of a round while it’s working to help shape a young entrepreneurial team, Leone said no, that if an entrepreneur thinks that “CrunchFund has a differentiated set of skills that will help you, then by all means” take its money. (It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.)

Pointing out that too much money is already chasing startups, including from Europe, Russia, and the likes of Goldman Sachs, Leone then told Arrington, “You’re joining the abundant side of market, instead of the scarcity side of the market…Why you want to join [the world of venture capital] is beyond me.”

Mind you, Seqoia is itself not too pleased about the rise of the dumb money tide:

Leone tried to be diplomatic about all the cash sloshing around Silicon Valley these days, but it clearly irks Sequoia that the firm – along with all venture firms – has been painted as a later-stage investor by many seed and angel entrepreneurs, despite that it regularly makes seed investments.

Indeed, Leone said his advice to entrepreneurs is to “think of investors as your business partners” and not just in terms of “what you need over the coming months but over the next four to five years.

The role of the incubators, accelerators etc etc is to now manufacture enough startups for all the sloshing money to be thrown at. Maybe the next Arrington business should be a Y-Crunchinator?

Google has bought food review business Zagat - ZDNet:

Google on Thursday acquired Zagat in an effort to bolster its local products with the restaurant rating service. More notably is that Zagat is a content company.

In a blog post, Google said that Zagat will “be a cornerstone of our local offering.” Zagat is best known for its original reviews and rating service.

There are a few key elements to the Zagat purchase:

- Google will build out its local coverage and have reviews in more than 100 cities.
- Google is showing that it may actually have to own some content instead of merely aggregating it.
- As Robert Scoble noted, Zagat’s reviews are social friendly and play in with Google+.

Earlier this year, Google ran afoul of Yelp. Yelp argued that Google was importing its user reviews on the Google Places page and not providing any link love. Google later removed external links from its Places page. The Federal Trade Commission is also poking around Google’s actions and whether it favors its own sites over others.

That says it all about why Google may have done the deal really, but the reason I'm even writing about this post is a few years back we were asked to do a study of what Zagat could become in a social media setting and who it may be sold to, and for how much, but I never dreamed Google would be the one to buy them as it made no sense (at the time) that Google would be a content owner. (Our client was not Zagat, but wanted to interest Zagat in a potential transaction - and this was not them as far as I know). ZDNet asks the right questions:

- Will Google keep Zagat’s pay wall? Probably not.
- Will Google maintain Zagat’s guide publishing business?
- Is this Zagat purchase the beginning of a series of content moves for Google? Google’s timing is notable given the struggles of both AOL and Yahoo of late. Both AOL and Yahoo are building out content to differentiate themselves from Google. Now the search giant enters the content game via Zagat.

Even so, with opening up the reviews and sticking ads against them, this is not really going to move the Googleneedle. Zagat is not the quite Huffington Post, or even TechCrunch.

So despite the purchase and the above justifications and possble strategic plays, does it make sense that Google is a content owner now? I must say I'm still not clear why Google would want to be a content owner, it's a whole different culture and business model compared to being an aggregator, especially for a search based one. It ws very fashinable in teh Muiltimedited Mid 90's, everyone talked about being "Gatekeepers" to content and extracting "surplus value" - a bkit like medieval castles on large rivers. Ironically it was Google that broke this content/aggregation model by allowing neutral searches on the open web.

The argument clearly is the "Social" changes things, but we didn't see it at teh time we did the study, and don't see it now. Twitter and Facebook point to content outside themselves all the time, both can give me a restaurant review in a few seconds if I ask (or search them), and there are umpteen free startups out there already.

One to watch, but at the moment I am scratching my head.