blogging.vc

I just spent an hour catching up on my feeds and there are a few house notes I wanted to post for some time, so here comes a real “laundry list” post.

• Google seems to be announcing lots of stuff these days. Old news for most of you already, its new Real Estate service probably got most of the buzz, but unfortunately it doesn’t pull up on the German Google…check Shimon Sandler for screenshots and find more analysis on how this affects vertical search at Burnham’s Beat.Their introduction of related links, the expanded AdWords referral program and new AdWords position preference feature got of course less buzz, but is probably quite valuable for advertisers. I also liked playing with this nice Google Map Generator, and I am sure we’ll see lots of interesting stuff with the new Google Maps API released earlier this month. Ok, enough of Google.
• I continue to be impressed by the quality of product feedback that bloggers give with detailed reviews. Today, I was pointed (Thanks Bjoern!)to a series of posts at Volker Weber’s blog reviewing the Sonos Music System, which is made by one of our portfolio companies.
  No, I am not writing this to advertise Sonos, but to show what important marketing impact bloggers can have. My takeaway (and no, don’t expect something completely new to you to follow, this is a VC blog…) is that it becomes more and more important for consumer-focused companies to listen to their customers early on and encourage feedback. The blogosphere will undoubtedly reveal and amplify the perception of all the good and bad things about the experience with a certain product.
  Reviews like these allow for more educated purchase decisions, and suddenly become a driver for a new kind of customer segment. In a similar way, one of the readers of my blog decided to buy a Cingular 2125 phone after reading my previous post about it - so apparently my blog has become a marketing tool for a consumer product.
• A good friend of mine is kicking around an idea to do something interesting with Internet forums. You know, the places you end up at for searches like “trouble mac power supply”. If you’d like to help him out, it be great if you took 5 minutes to run through his survey. If you do, I’ll buy you a coffee at his behalf if you meet me at an upcoming event such as Reboot.dk (honor system, folks!). Here’s the link to the survey. Thanks!
• Another house item: I posted a job ad some time ago looking for people to help me research young Internet companies. I received a flurry of great applications and a few keep trickling in, so I just wanted to say that I am happy I found a great fit and so the job is gone, but there is a good chance I’ll need more help in the future at which point I would post again. I can only encourage anyone to use their blog for recruiting, I received applications from highly qualified people. Thanks to everyone again who applied and I am bummed that I couldn’t hire more of you.

That’s it for today. Just not enough time to blog these days.