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

Managing Intangible Assets

The new report on " l'economie de l'immateriel" from Levy (Publicis) & Jouyet (Inspection des Finances)  is now online (but in French...) : Téléchargement rapportlevyjouyet1.pdf

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...

CGS Dinners are Back

UPDATE: WE HAVE MOVED THE DATE TO TUESDAY DEC 12 (same time, same place)

CGS dinners are back on Tuesday Dec 12 at 20:30 following the Web3.0 gathering  next week. You can register on this post using the comments, I'll circulate the final attendee list + menu + logistic later. Seating will be restricted to 30 for room 1 and 30 for room 2 (counting with 20% no-show / overbooking, this allow for 75 people to register)...

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

Current Participant list (8 seats still available as of dec 8, and I'm working an getting us more space for the dinner using the two floors of the restaurant, which should allow for 60 people to attend... more new on this later here  I have increased the seating capacity to 30 seats for room 1 and 30 seats for room 2 => WE STILL HAVE SPACE ;-) ) :

• Room 1:
• 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

• Room 2
• 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. David Grunberger
12. Florent Boutellier
13. guido van nispen
14. Christian Jegourel
15. Laurent Esposito
16. David de JobMeeters
17. Jacob Share
18. Loic Moisand
19. Thibault Hanin
20. Eric Dos Santos
21. Stephane Lee
22. Netanel Jacobsson
23. Stefanos Vasdekis
24. John Nousis
25. Remi Poittevin
26. Jean Batiste Rudel
27. Adriaan Verstijnen
28. Willem Vos
29. Franck Poisson

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           

Forget technology, focus on attention attractors.

My ScienceBusiness article no 2, can be found here or below:

I had an interesting meeting with a senior executive in charge of strategy and business development at one of the major European media group last Friday.

My friend is one of the smartest and most articulate media executive. I spend one hour telling her about the interesting infrastructure and technology play I was looking at, and she spend one hour telling me that she count not care less for super-encryption technology, or smart-delivery video infrstructure, but how she was looking for low-tech, mass-market services that would drive customer attention in the key customer segments market where her group was active.

Yesterday, Umair Haque in one of his well articulated post made exactly the same point:

The investment thesis behind infrastructure plays is simple - and too simplistic. It is often simply that demand is racing ahead of supply - and so it pays to invest along in those segments of the value chain which make production technically and marginally more efficient. Of course, the key hidden assumption is that dominant design of the value chain (the sum of business models, the way value is created and captured) is still valid; still in sync with industry economics.

Now, this is an investment thesis that has doomed most VCs to watch a disproportionate number of their highest-geek-quotient investments continue to go sideways - while puzzling over the accelerating success of of largely anti-technological plays like flickr, delicious, Skype, Habbo Hotel and MySpace.

Fox's acquisition (Scout media, Newroo, Ksolo, WhatIfSport, MySpace) thesis is a bit more complicated - but predicated on a much deeper understanding of the new media value chain. Fox invests in domains which are hypersocial (discontinuous shifts in social connectivity) or hypercultural (discontinuous shifts in cultural specificity): sports, karaoke, music. Further, Fox invests at the edge of the new value chain: at the interface with consumers. Further, Fox invests in the three roughly distinct models which live there : markets, networks, and communities.Why? Because Fox understands the deep economics of new media. Value capture in the new media value chain is a function of market power. And market power is a function of attention. And attention is allocated most efficiently by markets, networks and communities. Consider MySpace. MySpace's success is driven by it's proprietary music and now video player - the deepest social widget in the new media world. It is what lets fans connect to bands they might love - it is what allocates their attention hyperefficiently (more efficiently than Top 40 charts, corporatized radio robo-DJs, or even next-gen corporobots, like Pitchfork Media).

Infrastructure driven investments are nearly flawlessly discovering the wrong future. It's the future where infrastructure lays the pipes for scores of generic markets, networks, and communities. Of course, this is the future that already happened, which consumers thought sucked, and so they stopped using the www

What's different about today is that visionaries like Fox (surprisingly enough) understand that what drives attention allocation is the hypersocial and hypercultural; and what drives the hypersocial and the hypercultural in, for example, music and sports, is marginally, but deeply, different.

…If recent history teaches us anything strategic, it's that the Cambrian Explosion in media is about radically redefining the economic essence of media; redefining media production and consumption for an attention and interaction economy; redefining how media shapes the social and the cultural to allocate attention, exploding value creation and value capture.

3 Companies to watch that illustrated this :

• VPod.TV (who just announce a 4M€ A round last Friday)
• Zilio
• Wikio

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)

Silicon Labs buys Silembia for 20M$

Silicon Laboratories Inc. has agreed to buy Silembia SA ( Rennes, France), a developer of semiconductor intellectual property for digital television demodulation and channel decoding, for  $20 million.
Founded in 2004 by former employees of Philips, Silembia went on to create the EMB5000 DVB-C digital video decoder core. The Silembia acquisition brings a design team with experience in digital demodulation and system architecture design to Silicon Laboratories ( Austin, Texas)