This morning I gave a talk on “Business Models for Web 2.0 companies” at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. For those interested, the slides can be downloaded here.Looks like there is a good turnout of people here, it’s just unfortunate that the Berlin Fairgrounds that were chosen as a venue must be the blandest space there is in Berlin…but there’s hope, several parties are planned for tonight!
Congratulations to everyone in our portfolio company Fotolog! These guys have worked incredibly hard for many years to build what has become an extremely close-knit and active community of people sharing pictures on a daily basis. This is not “just another” photo sharing site, but a communications platform where people communicate through daily uploading of one picture and comment on each others works. But what am I talking…the fact that the site has more than 10 million registered users without the use of any marketing $$ is a testament to the quality of the site and the community. Again, congrats!
Here’s the official release. And here’s Om’s first take.
Want to put your startup on the map? Here’s your chance: The two fantastic students working for me (they did all the real work!) decided that my idea of mapping start-ups in flickrvision.com-style could be some fun so we threw a few hours of work at it and here’s the result: www.startupvergnuegen.com
What’s it for?
Some fun: just watch in what places start-ups are popping up. It used to be all Silicon Valley maybe…but not anymore! Go ahead and fill in your company, and this could become a good place for finding out companies in your area that you might not have heard of, figuring out interesting employers if you are moving somewhere or what not….
Who should be on it?
No firm rules so far. We figured it’d be great to have start-ups (surprise, surprise), but also angel and VC investors or other people who frequently deal with start-ups would be a good fit.
Who is behind it?
The folks at BV Capital and notably our part timers Michael Bumann (who did the coding) and Benjamin Wittorf (logo and some other stuff).
Where does the name come from?
The German word “Vergnuegen” (or “Vergnügen” with the correct Umlaut)means amusement, delight. And after all, “Fahrvergnuegen” is a word that Volkswagen firmly established in the US with an advertising campaign ca.1990 (check out ad1 and ad2). So hey, why not use this for a site that’s a little fun and was engineered in Germany?
So why does a VC do this?
No, we don’t think this will become a venture investment opportunity. No, we didn’t put millions into this. We get asked very often which intersting companies are in a particular sector or geographic area, and that is how the idea came up. And thanks to Google maps it was not too hard to implement…
How should I use it?
Don’t be ridiculous…
Ok, now please go over to startupvergnuegen.com and enter YOUR name and location! Thanks!
Thanks to the folks at Vuze, I got a ticket to the Techcrunch Party at August Capital. I have to say that for anyone wanting to understand what “Silicon Valley Networking” is about, such a party is the best crash course. Selected obeservations:
- Setup. A few hundred people on a sunny deck on Sand Hill Road and free beer is all that’s required to set up - the rest of the ambiance is created by plenty of sponsorship signs. Food doesn’t help since you need one free hand to exchange business cards in frequent intervals.
- Corporate Apparel. If you are with a start-up, make sure you wear a corporate Polo or T-Shirt. And if your company chose to go with a shirt whose design is about as discreet as a Dutch soccer jersey, don’t worry - this is a fashion-free zone (apart from the ladies, who are almost all employed by PR agencies for some unexplainable reason…)
- Name tags. Feels like they have an eye magnet built in - everyone wanders around looking at each others name tag first - then you get to looking at the face. Helps men to understand how women must often feel.
That said, this type of party is great to meet new people and refresh old contacts in a very casual atmosphere. The trick is that even though it is declared as a networking event, it doesn’t feel forced…networking just happens between a beer and the next one. That’s because it’s an integral part of Silicon Valley - you are, therefore you network.
P.S.: There was a bunch of Germans there, too: Aside from Silicon Valley residents Konstantin von Guericke and Tim Bonnemann I ran into people whose office is no more than 5 miles from my Hamburg office, such as Tim von Toerne and Matthias Henze….
The FAZ posted an article today claiming that an increasing number of US VCs are starting to look for investments in Germany and also considering to open offices in London. Now, haven’t we heard this story once before? 1999 all over again?
However, when you read on, the authors point out that most of the investments the US investors care about are in Cleantech, or other, engineering-heavy sectors as opposed to only the currently overhyped Web 2.0 area (although, confusingly, the article first talks about the Samwer brothers and other angels, who are primarily active in consumer Internet).
One thing is for sure: There is a tremendous amount of German engineering talent, that has never really connected with the VC philosophy of quickly ramping up a company if there is a disruptive innovation. In areas like mechanical and electrical engineering, it’s still much more about slowly but steadily building companies and trading of growth for less risk….which is great, but if VCs can help tilt the balance towards faster growth for some cases, that would certainly be a good thing…
The Worldbank released a piece of software called BuzzMonitor that keeps track of what is being said about the Worldbank on the Internet. While I haven’t tried it (you have to set it up on a server) it has some interesting features like using the Yahoo terms API for automatic tag extraction from all incoming feeds. Three things that surprise me about this:
- Systematically tracking one’s own image on the Internet is something that probably not many public organizations do
- Not hiring Accenture for the job. That they worked with a small, dedicated team and a small software outfit while collaborating with other public agencies seems great
- Releasing the software open source…either there are some pretty open minded people in the Worldbank’s IT organization or someone collected a lot of signatures…
Anyways, maybe my impression of the Worldbank is too negative, but this certainly casts a positive light on them…
(discovered via Data Mining and Ben)
Suddenly, my old Buffalo LinkStation network storage at home crashed, and of course there was some data on there I had not recently backed up…so I took it apart (if you ever disassemble a LinkStation, note that they think it’s funny to hide a screw behind the model sticker - I found this out the hard way after a lot of cursing…) and pulled out the harddrive. After sticking it into a USB enclosure, I was happy to hear it spin up….but disappointed to get an error from my Mac telling me it could not mount the disk (it’s a Linux native partition that Mac OS X cannot mount). So what do you do??
I ended up finding UFS Explorer on the web. It’s software from a Ukrainian company called SysDevSoftware, and they should learn how to do a website that’s at least nearly as good as their software. However, running it on Windows (with Parallels by SWSoft, a company founded by a Russian entrepreneur….) the trial version quickly identified the Linux partition on my drive and I was able to read files from it. So I went on and spent the $22 in order to buy a license (”standard access” version) which allows you to actually copy all the files off the mounted disk. It works like a charm…the only drawback is that it seems slow, but that may be due to my Parallels setup.
UFS Explorer also seems to have disk recovery functionality, so I suggest trying it out next time you run into disk trouble…
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