Posts Tagged ‘venture capital’

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Betreff: Venture capital in germany over the time #webinale
Von: "Viktoria Trosien" <viktoria.trosien@gmail.com>
Datum: 25.05.2009 11:42

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As pointed out in part 1 of Viktoria's interview with blueKiwi's CEO and co-founder Carlos Diaz, the company has a pretty clever subscription based business model. Carlos now talks about the importance of looking at the size if one is editing software:

„Most of the software will be provided on size tomorrow. The size model is very interesting and also quite disruptive. Companies used to buy software making an investment first, then command and pray so that there will be no errors on their software. With size this is not a problem anymore since you pay only for the users you have.“

He adds that another advantage of a subscription based model is that you have all the maintenance, helpline and evolution of the product already included in the annual user fee:

„People want to start with your solution very simply and quickly and leave it when they don’t believe in it anymore.“

Talking about blueKiwi’s market, Carlos points out:

„In the field of social software most of the big players like jivesoftware or Teligence are American. Within the next three years, we want to demonstrate that a European player can become a leader. We know who our competitors are and with whom we are going to be fighting.“

Last but not least, Carlos’ advice for starting a company is:

„Work on your business model and keep it simple. If you can raise money today, do it. Then take the money and run!“

If you want to learn more about blueKiwi Software, also watch „Carlos Diaz – blueKiwi Software: Corporate Facebook, part 1“

BlueKiwi Software.com, founded 1 ½ years ago, provides social networking solutions for large organizations. Like a „corporate Facebook“, blueKiwi provides tools to manage an organization’s relationships to the people they care about: Clients, partners and employees. As CEO and co-founder Carlos Diaz points out

„if the enterprises don’t jump into social networking, employees will do it without them. What’s happening right now on the web is not congruent to what’s happening within the organizations.“

According to Carlos, organizations

„spent a lot of money in building up their information system – what they now need to do is to build up their relationship system.“

BlueKiwi’s software mixes people together in a private and confidential network in order to strengthen relationships between employees, partners and clients, share ideas and best practices, get feedback, create innovation and thereby accelerate time to market.

Right now, blueKiwi has around thirty customers, mostly large multinational organizations like BNP Paribas, Societé Générale, Alcatel and Dassault Systemes. Since blueKiwi’s solution is provided with a subscription model based on a fee per user per year, for Carlos it is „mandatory to make our clients happy with our product.“ A quite clever business model, as Viktoria from Tiburon-TV points out, especially with clients like Nokia growing from 100 to 5000 employees ...

Watch out for Part 2 of Viktoria’s interview with Carlos, which will be shown tomorrow.

Ulike.net is an entertainment suggestions website, co-founded three years ago by French entrepreneurs Mathieu Léronde & Raphaël Labbé. According to Raphaël, they spent one year on the algorhythm before having the website running two years ago. Ulike is all about sharing what you like or hate and getting recommendations: It offers 50 different categories with subgroups, i.e. books, music, movies, people, characters, cities or countries. Based on your ratings in these categories, Ulike gives you recommendations matching your interests so that you can discover new things. So it acts as a filter for any kind of entertainment. Raphaël points out that when it comes to music or books on the web, making discoveries „is ok right now, for example with LibraryThing“, but what’s new with Ulike is its broad approach and the possibility of building bridges from one content to another. I.e. Ulike will recommend a book based on your movie and music taste. Furthermore, it helps you to meet other people with the same tastes. With 70.000 - mainly European - users and 6 mio. ratings on its website, there are already 300.000 items on Ulike’s website. Each day 200 items are added by its core contributors. „Hopefully one day our userbase will be as big as the one of Last.fm“, says Raphaël. He points out that „we are still early in the process of having the personalized, collaborative, filtering algorhythm deployed around content.“ In order to broaden Ulike’s market, Raphaël wants „to evangelize the possibilities of that recommendation“ through TV or press content. Ulike raised money from French insurer AXA and has „good Business Angels“. In order to get a feel for Ulike, check out Raphaël’s lounge http://www.ulike.net/leafar

Silentale.com, founded by Laurent Feral-Pierssens and based in Paris, will be opening in a limited beta version starting in January. Using archival and search tools, Silentale aggregates personal conversations by e-mail, voicemail or chat and brings it to one secure place online. Since we all talk to the same people through different channels, Silentale can help us to put a thread between all conversations and provide a history of them. Laurent stresses that the information is personal, very well secured as well as not visible. No data mining will be done. Silentale’s service is subscription-based and users pay for the service they get: „Our customers value their information and they want to feel that relationship between them and us“ remarks Laurent. Silentale will be rolling out API and thereby be extended to Outlook Desktop Agent, iPhone SMS, iPhone App and Android.
Within Silentale’s preparation process of over two years, Laurent initially considered advertising, but finally decided „not to touch user data and not to put any ads.“ Silentale is backed by a very wide North-American and European group of investors that have funded successful companies before. Laurent finds it of utmost importance „to keep one’s value chain as short as possible. Be careful if you need three partners or four ways to make money“. His goal for Silentale is „to simply have a number of users“ in 2009 without being specific about it. With bouncing boards and jumping boards all over the place, Silentale tries to make its first impression everywhere at the same time, then penetrate in a marketing sense of way the markets locally. As Laurent says: „One needs to have a global approach and execute locally“. 
Silentale brought back the People’s Choice Award from LeWeb08. Users can participate in its beta by going to www.silentale.com

Charles Nouyrit, founder and CEO of MyID.is, says he is „happy because he is doing serious business“. His company MyID.is has been founded in March 2007 and is privately held with Charles acting as a business angel. MyID is offering a digital identification platform where users can certify their ID worldwide and thus improve their trustability online. Charles points out: „It might sound naive, but we want to make the internet a better and safer place.“
Users pay only once between €2-5 in order to get access to MyId’s platform. With some thousand users today, MyID.is is still in the alpha version. According to Charles, the platform will be launched at the end of January.
Unlike MyId’s American competitor BeenVerified.com, where your ID is certified with your social security number, MyID’s verification process is based on your credit card and your bank as well as your personal address.
Charles has been working with the internet since 1983 – MyID is his sixth venture, with two companies in the telecoms and three in the internet business. Not all of his ventures have been successful, but Charles points out: „That’s part of the game. As an entrepreneur you take risks, so sometimes you fail. These are actually your best lessons since you only start analyzing when you failed. You will never learn from your success.“

Jan-Joost Rueb, co-founded eBuddy.com 4 ½ years ago and is now its CEO. eBuddy aggregates chat between Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and others on the web and on mobiles offering a unified interface. As an added service to chats, eBuddy started offering ICQ in Germany. 41 people are working in eBuddy’s office in Amsterdam and the company now has over 100.000 new users every day and around 8 million users per month. With 1.5 billion banners ads on the web, worldwide advertising is crucial for eBuddy's business. According to Jan-Joost, mobile advertising will be launched in Q1 or Q2 this year. Furthermore, eBuddy has secured €5 million in its series A financing by Lowland Capital Partners and had a financing round with €6.5 million by Prime Technology Ventures. They will be reaching the last funding round in January. Jan-Joost points out: „In the beginning we were really focussed on making money, so much so that the VCs were laughing at us. Now we’re really happy we did it, since we have a healthy business.“ Jan-Joost wants to be „the biggest messenger on mobile phones worldwide“ and plans to grow by having big deals with carriers. He is positive that „in a few years every single phone will have IM on it – hopefully it’s going to be eBuddy. We have the cards to win that game, we just have to play it right!“

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Igor Smirnoff from Newspaperdirect.com explains how traditional businesses like newspapers and magazines migrate their products successfully into the digital realm. Newspaperdirect’s online resource is called PressDisplay.com and offers more than 850 newspaper and magazine titles. Publications have been optimized so that you’ll be able to access your favorite paper using a smartphone, an iPhone, an iPod Touch or a BlackBerry device and browse it at your convenience. Besides the above mentioned devices, Igor introduces two other units with a smaller and a larger format: An E-Reader, the first foldable paper device which is also a phone and the new iRex DR1000 - a sleek and lightweight portable digital reader with a10-inch screen. Unlike the Amazon Kindle which offers only limited editions of papers, the iRex device presents full editions as they were published. Being a technology evangelist, Igor believes „you need to be passionate about what you do and believe in it. Things that five years ago sounded outrageous are standard today. Know your stuff, know your market and opportunities and dream in a huge way!“ Last but not least Igor advices: „Attend events like Le Web. These are phantastic networking opportunities.“ ...

David Hornik has an eclectic educational background: He holds an B.A. in Computer Music from Stanford University, an M.Phil in Criminology from Cambridge University and a Law Degree from Harvard Law School. But as soon as David started working with startup companies he found it „completely addictive“ and figured out that this was what he loved. When he got to know people from August Capital in 2000, they asked him to consider to come on their side of the table. He decided to join them and still finds it was the right decision: „I’m very grateful and couldn’t be happier.“ Having no particular expertise David calls himself „a collectic“ and finds that a lot of successful investors are generalists. With August Capital, David funded a broad set of companies, amongst others  a blogging company called Six Apart, the media ad platform VideoEgg, the U.S. payroll company Paycycle and the search engine Splunk. Furthermore, he seed-funded Technorati. With regard to the economic downturn, David finds that „entrepreneurs that endure tough times and make their businesses work despite the economy end up building valuable businesses.“ According to David, August Capital will be raising a new fund and „is always looking for smart teams that are developing interesting technology .“ In order to get funded by August Capital David advises: „It’s best to get introduced to me by someone trust. Then feel free to write an e-mail to hornik --@-- augustcap --.-- com.“ David stresses the importance of relationships: „You have to be engaged in the community and build relationships. I honestly think business is a very personal thing. For starting up a company find the right people first. We’re at August Capital are much more likely to fund a team than a technology. Who you have joined forces with to build a startup will mean a lot more than what you are up to.“ David Hornik is also a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Harvard Law School as well as the author of VentureBlog and VentureCast.

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Scott Rafer, U.S. serial entrepreneur since 1992, founded Lookery.com in July 2007 after his former company MyBlogLog.com has been sold to Yahoo. Lookery.com started off as a Facebook advertising network right after the Facebook platform was launched. According to Scott „Facebook was great for start-ups at the beginning. Then, after a year it was a great place for big companies and not so good for start-ups.“ Having understood that, Scott took Lookery out of the Facebook platform. He now finds it important to use Facebook Connect and its free distribution and to have an extra strategy, since he expects Facebook Connect to be dead next fall. Lookery.com sells user targeting data - mostly small, privacy-friendly profiles including age, gender and a keyword - to the top 20-30 big advertising networks in the world. Scott says: „We’re the high volume/low cost people. There is no one in the business who sells a huge number of profiles really cheap.“ Scott believes in simple business models: „Anything complex is terrible. The older I get and the more experienced I am, the less I attempt. I try not to get any venture capital – business angels are the only people I deal with if I have to take any investment at all.“ Scott’s advice for starting a company is to „do the simplest thing you can, take small amounts of money and get profitable very quickly!“

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