Occam's Razor

CGS 5.0 Dinner is Sold Out

CGS dinners are back with a SOLD OUT CGS5.0 on Tuesday Dec 12 at 20:30 following the Web3.0 gathering  next week.

Bistrot Vivienne ,  4 rue Petits Champs 75002 PARIS, +33 1 49 27 00 50

Current Participant list (we have two rooms, room 1 upstair and room 2 in the ground level, as we have a very full party, i have assigned people to one of the two rooms so the restaurant can serve us dinner, we will then move from one room to the other)

  Room 1 (35 seats):

·       Jeff Clavier ; Marc Goldberg ; Rodrigo Sepulveda

1.    Alexandre Casassovici

2.   Aydin Senkut

3.   Benjamin Carlu

4.   Carlos Diaz

5.   Cedric Maloux + 1

6.   Denis (from Jiwok)

7.    Esme Vos

8.   Ivan Communod

9.   John Vars

10. Jamin Rubio

11.  Jacques Froisant

12.  Lucie Anne Radimsky

13.  Leila X (from the WSJ)

14.  Mathieu Nouzareth

15.  Mayel de Borniol

16.  Nico Guyon

17.  Olivier Maurel

18.  Ouriel Ohayon

19.  Paul Elosegui

20. Pascal Boiteux

21.  Richard Menneveux

22. Scott Rafer

23. Sebastien Martin

24. Stephanie Beaujard

25. Thomas Blard

26. Thomas Owadenko

27.  Eran Lagon

28. Renee Blodgett

29.Virginie Robert

30. isa serfaty-bloch

31. Taki Krim

32 Louis Nauges

Room 2 (43 seats)

·       Eric Plantier; Colette Ballou Lamotte ; Yves Michali

1.    Marc Oiknine 

2.   Leafar

3.   Philippe Monteil

4.   Darius Modaressi-Tehrani

5.   Philippe Pinault

6.   Julien Andre

7.    Louis van Proosdij

8.   Franck Perrier

9.   Patrick Ferran

10. Manuel Diaz

11.  Florent Boutellier

12.  guido van nispen

13.  Christian Jegourel

14.  Laurent Esposito

15.  David de JobMeeters

16.  Jacob Share

17.  Loic Moisand

18.  Thibault Hanin

19. Eric Dos Santos

20.  Stephane Lee

21. Netanel Jacobsson

22. Stefanos Vasdekis

23. John Nousis

24. Remi Poittevin

25. Jean Batiste Rudel

26.  Adriaan Verstijnen

27. Willem Vos

28. Franck Poisson

29. Kevin Slavin

30 Guillaume Limare

31 Charles Nouÿrit

32 Roy Klieger

33 Aymeril Hoang

34 Remi Poittevin

35 François Nonnenmacher

36 Sagi Rubi + 1

37 Andrew Carlton

38 Brett Wayne

LeWeb3

I'm getting ready for next week conference. I'll be there on Monday all day until 5pm + party on Monday evening + CGS dinner on Tuesday night.

Let me know if/when you want to meet...

Paris BarCamp is on

It's now official, the Paris BarCamp will be on on Saturday June 10 2006. All registration and information can be found here.

I was one of the participant  in the KinnerNet2006 un-conference last March, where I had some of the best time and most interesting conversations.

I hope that we can create something of the same quality and level in Paris, and look forward to June 10.

Getting ready for reboot8

I'm getting ready for the reboot8 conference that will start on Wednesday evening in Copenhagen. Let me know if you plan to attend so we can meet there.

I'm also very interested in any feedback/question/idea to prepare for a workshop that's hosting on Building profitable OSS business. 

I plan to review and organise a discussion on how Profitable Businesses have been build on scalable OSS operation (MySQL, JBoss, RedHat etc...) . How do we move up the stack and build profitable un-scalable OSS businesses. The workshop will reflect on what happen as we move up into application areas (SugarCRM and up the food chain) and if/how/what can be done to build profitable un-scalable vertical OSS businesses.

Update 1: good pre-reboot8 post from Dannie Jost:

1. who we are: reboot is a gathering of 400 or so people all with a vested interest to some degree or another in internet technology, software, social software, technology itself, society. the kinds of people whom we are so fond of calling geeks. that is, those rare souls that dare to break a few old worn out patterns and to explore new territory.
2. the world that we live in: whatever it is that we want to call our age - information, digital, knowledge, techno-freaked-muddled, post-industrial, web 2.0 - it is an age where resources are plenty and easily sourced. logistics and knowledge do play

a major

role. part of the logistics is the communication, and that is where most information technology finds itself.
3. my observation/assertion: there is a paradigm shift currently taking place in what concerns creating a thriving business.a thriving business is a business that is sustainable. to me a business is sustainable when it makes its community prosper (read, happy, fulfilled, satisfied, peaceful). note that for a community to prosper, maintaining the status quo is not a requirement. all to say that business is about people.business is not  about goods or money, but about people making their world - this world now - work for them and allowing all to live in dignity.
4. my inference: in a world where resources are abundant and that is dependent on both logistics and communication, the key resource is intelligence. if

the crown

jewels of our age are intellectual assets, how are we going to deal with intellectual property rights?

CleanTech winds are blowing strong

My ScienceBusiness article no 3, can be found here or below:

Last Week Innovate2006 conference in Zaragoza included a pre-conference tour of the region with an interesting visit of Endesa and one of the largest spanish windmill farm located just a few miles north off Zaragoza. At the end of 2004, Endesa participated in operational wind farms delivering 1,124 MW with a further 250 MW under construction, which signifies a share of 20% in the Spanish wind power mark.

This visit resonated for me with all the recent interest in cleantech funding, and the slew of IT-CleanTech companies that we at Occam have looked at in the past few months.

Venture capitalists continue to energize clean technology companies with fresh capital.
Financing for companies attempting to develop new sources of renewable energy, new processes and materials for manufacturing, and new technology for managing energy use, rose to a six-year high of $513 million in the first quarter of 2006, according to data from Cleantech Venture Network LLC. The figure is up from $502 million in the fourth quarter of 2005 and over 50% above the $336 million invested in the first quarter of 2005.  Again, it was new energy investments that led the way. Companies developing new technologies for energy generation raised $357 million in the first quarter, more than the total invested in all clean technology sectors in the first quarter last year, according to data from the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based industry tracker.

Jefferies analyst recently produced a CleanTech industry overview which is very good and can be found here, while the full report can also be found here.

Interesting IT4Cleantech  companies to watch:

• Ergelis           

My new syndicated column in ScienceBusiness

ScienceBusiness is a great new online magazine covering Europe and how IP is turned into winning SMEs. Richard Hudson who is one ScienceBusiness founder convinced me to produce a bi-weekly colum on what we at Occam see happenidng on the groun here. The first installement can be found here or below in the post.

Online, down the line
I had the opportunity to take part as a speaker on an investor panel at the recent Total Telecom World Telecommunications Congress in Geneva. The panel was interesting - a strange dialogue between happy VCs funding disruptive telecommunication technologies (VoIP, IP convergence etc…) and troubled telecom executives. The key lessons from the conference can be structured as follows (those note are based on the minutes/comments taken by E. Jouanne from Occam Conseil).

Network infrastructure
The industry in experiencing cycles of maturation with similar patterns:  “Invest → chase volume → price down → competition eliminated → consolidation”,  today the number of “Baby Bells” is down to 2.5. The price of bandwidth is continues to fall, even if we are now for the first time seeing price stabilisation in some areas. The “must-haves” in the environment are Service Level Agreements and secure/reliable networks. Key stats: +65%  - IP traffic last year +100% - forecast for this year’s IP traffic, based on +25% this quarter. raffic structure “95% of the traffic is data. Video. Flat rate ”

P2P impact on biz models

Video bandwidth, Services entertainment, “5% is voice. VoIP accelerates changes (main driver in Business: to replace PBX)”, Value-added managed services, Tech to monetise and measure “what customers use”, customer centric measurement.

Access

Evolution in the mid term: Dynamic Frequency Allocation. Convergent networks: Intelligent Management Systems.

VoIP

“Voice revenue will disappear for sure. The only question is when will it be 18 months or 5 years?”. In the future three main areas of concern for the customers: “Quality of service: pricing will be key” Quality for pay: right lane, left lane.  Internet Service Providers will have to be forced by local regulations to disclose any IP delay management (used to slow down VoIP applications) “Security issue”

Mobile operators

“Today turnover for mobile is 80% voice, 14% SMS, 6 % data “→ “Ultimately it will be like fixed access turnover”. “There will more Instant Messaging usage (IM is the killer app for teenagers. IM will be bundled with VOIP), therefore more data traffic.”

TV/Quadruple play

Huge potential, could be called not quadruple play, but infinite play . Pricing. Flat rate vs. pay: you need to measure whether you charge or not, because there are costs associated to those events. Video on Demand most disruptive for the content industry and small TV stations. Digital Rights Management, secure network, quality

So what? Three cool innovative companies to watch

Checkpoint (VoIP security)
Baracoda (telecom churn management via Bluetooth-based services)
Zenops (mobile gaming)

Zaragoza's manuscrit

I'm on my way to the Innovate Europe 2006 conference that will stat tomorrow morning with an interesting PitchCamp where we will grill 25 startups on the art of pitching and business planning.

The conference starts on Monday evening with a great lineup of speakers.

I'll try to report/comment live during the first 3 days.

Telecom Conference in Geneva

I'm putting the final touch on my panel presentation at the  Telecom World  Congres next Thrusday in Geneva. Let me know if you are in Geneva that day, as I will have some time after my panel.

14.50 Panel: Funding new, new telecommunications businesses

Funding innovation
New business models / new service providers
Technology and equipment start-ups
Venture capital and Private Equity appetites
Risk / return profiles
Incubators and spin-off businesses
Key success factors
Case studies

Peter Gardner, Global Sector Head, Communications, 3i
Duncan Lewis, Senior Advisor, Telco & Media, The Carlyle Group
Marc Goldberg, Managing Partner, Occam Capital

Reboot8

Reboot 8 is getting ready for June 1st and 2nd. I’ll be there and would love to meet up with you is you plan to participate (skype/email/call me).

CGS4.0 planned for April 28 in Paris

I'm exited to announced the next (yes it's now released 4.0) CGS (Clavier Goldberg Sepulveda) dinner, that we will hosted in Paris on April 28, same rules of engagement as before (register here by posting a comment on this post). Seating is restricted to 30. I will circulated all logistics information (where, where, name of guest speaker,  etc...) in a few days...

Looking forward - Marc.