Occam's Razor

Meme explosion

Quite amazing to witness, it seem that the Web 2.0 meme is exploding live today on the blogosphere. Best demonstration is the suite of comment on crunchnote.

Let's finish this  argument, and le's go back to building companies (it's 11:55 pm here and i just got of a 90 min due diligence call focusing on margin, distribution, COGS, value pool and growth financing... ;-) ).

also on horsepigcow, and tech.life.blog

A People Business

Great perspective from Don Dodge on technology investment:

Real estate investment is all about location, location, location. Technology startup investment is all about people, people, people

E E Cummings

Re-reading EE Cummings today.

This is one of my favourite,  (read by Frederik, one of the character of Hanna's sisters) :

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence;
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

...

(I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice or your eyes is deeper than all the roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

10M$ D round NFC fundraising

INSIDE Contactless (Aix en Provence, France) announced yesterday (15/12/05) the closing of a € 9 million ($10.6 million) D round (following the 1996 A round of Alta Berkeley, the 1998 B round of GIMV and 3i, and the 1999 C round of Siparex, Vertex and NIF) led by three new investors: Sofinnova, Vertex Venture Capital (Israel) and Visa International. Prior round investors GIMV, Vertex Singapore and Siparex have also participated.

While at the standard level Bluetooth is moving toward NFC and UWB compatibility, it will be interesting to watch the game between Bluetooth software vendors like Baracoda and pure player on the NFC like INSIDE Contactless.

INSIDE Contactless is a provider of semiconductor chips (memory and microprocessor) and hardware platforms (couplers and readers) related to 13.56 Mhz contactless technology. Delivering cost-effective, reliable and secure technology for both contactless cards and readers, INSIDE provides high performance, open standard solutions for Payment, ID and Access Control. Headquartered in France with a global presence in China, Singapore and the US, INSIDE's worldwide customer portfolio includes providing MicroPass chips for Visa's contactless payment initiative and serving as the exclusive provider of smart card reader technology for HID's iCLASS access control solution.

Joel vs Doerr :: 1-0

You will find here John Doerr short video on the web2.0 incredible opportunities.

If you watch it, you MUST also real Joel rant which this is a short extract:

I'm starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite.

"That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

Now it's tagging and folksonomies and syndication, and we're all supposed to fall in line with the theory that cool new stuff like Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us are somehow bigger than the sum of their parts. The Long Tail! Attention Economy! Creative Commons! Peer production! Web 2.0!

Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it!"

Also David Galbraith on the same page:

Web 2.0 = Dotcombomb 2.0 = Bollocks 2.0

Most of what is 'Web 2.0' is based around ideas of a few people who had to ride out Web 1.0 with no buzz or funding, while people selling fresh mangos online were talking to VCs. This time perhaps the good people, the Evan Williams' Dave Winers' 'Ian Clarke equivalents are in their garretts building the real next generation web. Those people will be beavering away, building instead of talking.

Btw: As I'm focusing on finding out where the beef is, I vote with Joel and David on this on

;-)

100++ Web 2.0 Betas

Some of today's Web innovation pulse: The Museum of Modern Beta (The MoMB site)  has a bunch of cool Web 2.0 sites.

[Source Scoble]

Business Models Safari

Where is the beef ?

The question of monetization, of what value a company is creating and how it gets compensated and by who is central to every business plan discussion, and board argument. The short safari tour from Steve Bayle recent post is a good speed-overview on what the software industry has try in the course of the last 30 years. David Hornik recent note on where is the money in the long tail looks at the same issue but from a media/content perspective

....The computer industry has had a number of interesting business models. In the early days of the mainframe, software and services were bundled into one big package from IBM and the seven dwarfs. With the advent of the minicomputer that very tight vertical integration began to dissolve with the appearance of 3rd party software for DEC’s PDP line. With the loosening of vendor integration came a new market opportunity and a new business model system integration: where you got paid for putting Humpty Dumpy back together again. The PC dissolved the hardware/software/services monolith completely, ushering in the heyday of horizontal integration – a marketplace where customers could choose different hardware, software and peripherals from literally hundreds of vendors. Microsoft pioneered the concept of packaged software sold through retail outlets and for many years this model dominated the PC industry. But Microsoft, from its extensive experience as a supplier of first programming languages, such as BASIC, to companies like Altair and then Apple, developed the OEM model. … …One of the next interesting business models was the packaging of applications into suites. For a time the industry was divided between the concept of buying software that was “best of breed”, such as Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, and dBase II, versus buying a suite of software …... As PCs grew more and more common in the enterprise with the advent of the IBM PC and the IBM compatible standard, IT managers started rebelling against having to buy an expensive software package at retail for hundreds of computers. Thus the traditional business model of the volume discount got applied to packaged software… ... Vendors then responded with a new business model: the site license… … The network license was a business model variation on the site license, where the customer might pay only for simultaneous users, instead of having to pay a fixed amount for every machine, whether or not the software was ever installed. …Netscape invented a new and much emulated business model: giving away the client in order to sell the server. Up til then, companies paid for both a server and for every client connected to the server via the network. …This model looked great and it was until Microsoft counterattacked with one of their most potent business models: the bundling of applications and utilities with the operating system. This back to the future vertical bundling of system and applications software had already crushed several small companies that sold utilities that Microsoft decided to give away with the OS. …  ….The rise of open source software engendered yet another business model: add value to the software through packaging a distribution and providing tech support services. Red Hat, with its packaged Linux distribution was one of the first companies to make money from free software….   …..Another new business model was pioneered by the developers of Hot Mail. They gave away their Internet email application and generated revenue from ads embedded in email messages.The ad supported software model was emulated by Yahoo with Yahoo mail....  In parallel with the development of many of these new software business models, enterprise IT managers were getting increasingly frustrated by the upgrade cycle for their hundreds or thousands of PCs ...From this problem came a proposed solution: the application service provider or ASP. While initially many hailed this model as “utility computing” it wasn’t until Salesforce.com pioneered its hosted CRM model that this ideal began to take off. ...Today software as a service (SaaS) is the culmination of these business models. The business model – give away your software and make money from advertisers – is a  threat to the old volume and network licensing model that is Microsoft’s bread and butter….

Nordic M&A : Spectralink buys Kirk Telecom

SpectraLink (independent provider of mobile voice and messaging applications to businesses) has agreed to buy Kirk Telecom (Danish privately owned manufacturer of wireless applications for businesses in Europe and Asia-Pacific) for $61.3 million (fairly conservative multiples, as i its last fiscal year ended April, 30, 2005, Kirk had revenues of $35.9 million and net income of $2.7 million) .

Meme echo chamber ?

Judging by the noise yesterday on memeorandum, everybody was talking about the Alexa API opening.  Jeff Nolan and Brad Fled have two interesting posts on this new echo chamber effect where one (important but not unique) subject get's ALL the attention (ie more noise and less information).

This brings up another issue that blogs need to come to grips with, how to bring order and differentiation to the "room full of noise".

ALEXA (MAKE THAT AMAZON) LOOKS TO CHANGE THE GAME  —  (This will be updated when the service goes live, I was briefed and the embargo was 9 pm PST...)  —  Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game.  When it does, you find yourself saying - "Sheesh, of course that was going to happen.

Link Search: Google, Bloglines, Technorati, and IceRocket

Discussion: Social Patterns, ZDNet.com, Om Malik on Broadband, Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, Due Diligence, Web 2.0 Explorer, Rough Type, michael parekh on IT, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Search Engine Lowdown, Google Blogoscoped, pc4media, A VC, The Stalwart, The Glass is Too Big, Conversion Rater, Ho John Lee's Weblog, Things That, Between the Lines, Guardian Unlimited, Marketing Pilgrim, Incremental Blogger, TechBeat, business2blog, Boing Boing, PaidContent.org, Paul Kedrosky's …, RatcliffeBlog, Smalltalk Tidbits …, Toni Schneider's Blog, Mashable*, Susan Mernit's Blog, The Voice of Online …, Lost Remote TV Blog and PodTech Comments …

I'm also wondering what this will mean for the deep-web search players, and how this  opening  of the open-web index capability might help some of the european players (Exalead, Fast, Autonomy etc...).

Bluetooth standard push

More than 600M Bluetooth enabled devices have been shipped by the various members of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.

New standardization work has started to increase this market by enabling co-operating more closely with the Wi-Fi, Ultra-wideband (UWB) and Near Field Communications (NFC) wireless standards.

·         Bluetooth is used mainly for short-range wireless networks, and has a prime application in connecting wireless headsets to mobile phones, while Wi-Fi is the standard in wireless networking for laptops and home networks.

·         Near Field Communications (NFC) is a less common technology sending a signal over a distance of just a few centimetres.

·         UWB is an emerging standard commonly referred to as 'wireless USB' for its ability to transmit large amounts of data over a distance of up to 10 metres.

[Source VNUNET.COM]

This could be a big push for European startups like parrot or baracoda that are developping bluetooth based solutions.

UPDATE No 1: more on this on tonight's CNET posting  .