Fred Destin

My latest investment: InspirationalStores lands €10M for high-end e-commerce

I am delighted to announce the closing of my latest investment, in the form of a €10M round of funding (along with existing investor OTC Asset Management) into an exciting e-commerce business by the name of InspirationalStores.  I am very bullish about this new addition to my online portfolio (which today includes DailyMotion, PriceMinister, Seatwave, Sporever or Zoopla).

For clients such as Laduree, Delvaux or Caviar Kaspia, Inspirational Stores offers a complete turnkey offering covering every aspect of e-commerce, together with a consumer experience that completely reflects and respects the brand ethos and universe. To date the company has announced no less than 12 customers and established itself as leader in this next wave of luxury and niche e-commerce. It is about to launch its UK operation to accompany the local development of Laduree, which has recently opened a spectacular new Tea Room at Harrods designed by Roxane Rodriguez, as an homage to the French “Art de vivre”  (yes, I am borrowing from the press release but, hey, I wrote it :-)).

Why do I find this attractive:

• IS really designed itself from the outset as the long-term strategic partner to its brand partners.  The partners can focus on what they are the best at (great products, great brands) whilst IS can focus on optimised online marketing, CRM, operations, logisitics etc.  Online complexity is increasing, particularly on the marketing side; it take specific expertise and talent which is getting harder to find in the market. 
• This is a good example of touchless e-commerce.  Hence the operating leverage remains attractive.  Low cost of customer acquisition (partly because the brands are known), low returns (because the consumers know the products they are buying already), but high average baskets and reasonable margins all make for a sound business model.
• The team are veterans / pioneers in their field.  Michel de Guilhermier and Martin Genot were the founders of Photoways, the leader in online photo finishing (led today by the reportedly brilliant Stan Laurent.  Martin and Michel are true entrepreneurs who can knock down doors like no-one else and are masters of their trade (business and commercial development, back-end and logistics).  But these guys also knew their shortcomings and how to build a better team, so they brought on Erik-Marie Bion (one of the best known online marketers in France and a great people manager, as in his last role as MD at HiMedia) and Bruno Emsellem (CTO of GridXpert, IndustrySuppliers etc) to put together a kickass team with a very broad talent set.
• We just, you know, got along.  It's all about the social contract !

 

<--- Erik-Marie Bion with the "I got Flair" French look on him

Anyone who knows e-commerce will tell you it's all about execution, execution and execution.  With this team behind the wheel I am very confident that we have the right kind of obsessive, ambitious, high-impact people to build a really exciting property.  I don't like my entrepreneurs to be wilting lilies and these guys certainly qualify as true proponents of the unique "suspension of disbelief" required to make these project fly.

As a quick aside I am also glad to be finally doing a deal with my friend Greg Revenu at Bryan Garnier.  An added bonus.

Real all about it too on Michel de Guilhermier's Blog who added some nice quotes from some of the company's CEOs (and could not help post before TC got their hands on the story :-)).

<--- A high end umbrella from Alexandra Sojfer epitomises the kind of brands Inspirational Stores want to work with: great, best of breed niche products

Now on Techcrunch too courtesy of Ouriel (about 10 minutes from communication to post -- wow !!) here

Seedcamp in Paris

Last Friday the Seedcamp train was making its scheduled stop through Paris. 

Thanks to the good work of folks like Gilles B, Codor, Leafar, Jacques etc there was a good crop of startups that have been covered in detail by Mike B at TC.

SC continues to excel with the quality of its mentors; many startups were amazed to be able to interact with folks like Remy Amouroux.

For my part I had great fun moderating a panel with Dom Vidal (Index, Yahoo, Kelkoo), Gilles Babinet (Musiwave, Eyeka et. al.), Jerome Touze (WAYN), Jean Schmitt (Sofinnova) and Dider Kuhn (Screentonic).  I won't bore you with pearls of semi-wisdom but having folks that have built, financed and exit businesses around the table was great.  As is the style for Seedcamp, we tried to keep the discussion deeply pragmatic and practical.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Leafar, people as above.

Daniel Kahn (with J Bouteiller) shows French lawyers are Mac-cool

Technorati Tags: seedcamp,paris,startups

AOL seeks friends on Bebo

I just learnt that AOL, after failing to stabilise its huge online population through its core portal product offerings, has decided to seek solace with a smart social networking acquisition, announcing an $850M purchase of Bebo today.

Michael Birch, founder of Bebo, struck me as an oustanding founder when I met him.  From his strategic management of viral development to his unique product roadmap, Michael had what one might call "purity of vision" in how to develop his service, mixing high end maths with a deep understanding of communities.  This is a quality I witnessed rarely but saw shine though both at DailyMotion and Bebo.  True web2 DNA at work.

The outcome is great news for European venture and Barry at Balderton.  Here is again an example of a world class startup that started in the UK and Ireland and subsequently became a key SN player globally.

Congrats to Michael and Xochi, Joanna Shields, Barry at Balderton and all those involved.  What a great outcome.  I hope AOL lets this property flourish and that the team does not get enbroiled in what seem to be endless power plays at the floundering giant.

 

Barry at Balderton, reported to have made $140M on the transaction or about 9X.

Realeyes3D / Qipit cracks 1-D barcode

Barcode reading is an intriguing mobile app, which the potential to link billions of products in the physical world to the online realm, but so far technical hurdles have resulted in a poor user experience and low takeup.  This is however be about to change: breakthrough technology from RE3D now makes 1D barcodes readable from any mobile phone (PR here).

Read Alan Reiter, a recognised authority in the field of mobile imaging.  As he highlights:

Improvements in camera phones — higher resolution, close-up lenses and automatic focus — can result in better quality images.  But it remains difficult for the majority of handsets to take a sufficiently clear photo for barcode reader software to interpret.

What Realeyes3D has done is dramatically expand the number of phones that become useful barcode capture devices.  We are crunching through the data but it looks like the progress is fairly dramatic, with now 60 or 70% of phones enabled.

The Pondering Primate puts it better than me:

Billions of products can now be linked to the Internet simply by scanning the 1d bar code on the packaging !

Throw any barcode picture at the RE3D processors to associate it with the appropriate product.  Now of course there is not yet a global product / barcode repository but a number of the key players including Google are working hard on this, and there are a number of large, if disparate, product barcode repositories across the world.

Some great coverage at MobileCrunch too.

Barcode decoding has been done for a while notably in Japan using embedded software.  Fine in an iMode world that has standardized around a 2D barcode format (called QR Code) but hardly mass market.  In the absence of accepted 2D barcodes standards, Realeyes3D just made this a whole lot more accessible.

Now that the techology has landed, it is time to implement the great consumer and business applications that will make this a major success.

A soup to nuts approach from the digital to the physical and back

(This superb joke brought to you by the Qipit blog)

Infinite Babinet strikes again: $6.5M for MXP4

Gilles Babinet, of MusiWave fame, is back with Ventech (again) and Sofinnova and a new business called MXP4, whose funding was just announced today on YouVox (you gotta love French company names :-))



MXP4 is all about music being remixed and modified on the fly, from what I gather.  One way to achieve this is that a certain number of preset remixes of each track of a given song can be modified on the fly to give a different feel to a title, say play Thievery Corporation in full reggae mix or rehash Metallica as Ambient!  But this sounds more ambitious and exciting.  Gilles says that in testing with friends, the audience was happy to listen to the same artist all evening with the different mixes and moods keeping the interest level up.

That sounds pretty good to me.  Interacting with content in richer ways is part of how the digital natives experience media already anyway.

There are not enough details out yet to comment further in a public forum, but if you are interested in this field it is worth checking out what YourSpins does, for example with Robbie Williams.

Gilles is part of a growing possee of multi-project entrepreneurs a la Pierre Chappaz, who is co-CEO at Netvibes and Exec chair at Wikio.  He is also involved with Eyeka which he helped get off the ground, and some others.  Sylvain Huet and Philippe Ulrich are the co-founders on this one.   Infinite, unpredictable, interactive, the Gilles Way.  Can't wait to see this go live...

Technorati Tags: gillesbabinet, mxp4, ventech, sofinnova

UK online real estate: show me the money

There is a buzz in the UK market around the new startups (Extate, Zoomf, Nestoria, OnOneMap and others) that are leveraging mashups to provide higher value added services in property (or real estate for the Us readers).  Property is the #1 topic of conversation in London and most Brits are obsessed with the value of their property (yes, that would include me).

The content sources are well know and available to all, e.g.:

• the listings sites like fish4 or the actual agent sites like Foxtons
  
• maps
• the Land Registry pricing data
  

So set up some basic spidering and off you go, you can create a Web2 real estate service.  For example I now know that my neighbout did hit the target price on his house :-)

I am glad to see the next wave of innovation in this space; God knows it's needed.  As an example the only company that seems to be doing any SEO/SEM is PrimeLocation.

But for most of these services, I don't understand where the big money is. 

Some of the mashup companies that I have met are metaservices: they are relying on other people's listings and hoping to capitalise on high value CPC as the agents and sites fight for qualified traffic. But RightMove won't let you spider (with 30% of the listings inaccessible, that's a problem) and guys like Fish4 are supposedly as low as 30p per click.  I don't see how you build an attractive business without capturing more of the value.  The metrics just do not support it in my view.

Most of the startups are well aware of this so they have started to do more than spidering the portals but rather are extracting additional information directly from the agents' site (wether parsing or using feeds) and therefore disintermediating the portals.  Here the aggregation value is in building a slicker interface (no doubt price sliders a la Kayak are around the corner).  The proposition makes plenty of sense for travel which is used to paying referral fees and is a fantastic repeat business with multiple providers offering essentially fungible goods (flights from A to B) and fighting for the same customer.  The same does not seem to apply to real estate which involves unique goods traded once only.  You have the double challenge of driving enough volume to reach critical mass and getting agents used to paying for link placement or search terms.

The UK is a market that is fully intermediated (90% goes through agents), unlike say France.  If you are after the listing fees, attacking the world of the agents is hard work.  Nic says many agents are tired of paying the high listing fees demanded by the likes of RightMove.  That may be, but right now I don't see enough of them moving shop without a sales call from a qualified rep and some convincing numbers to boot.  I am not sure a free listings offering would be enough on its own to make a real dent in the market leaders either.

At Atlas we are still looking hard for the right opportunity in this space, one that can prove both disruptive but also sustainable and become the next gen leader.  Vecosys annouced Zoomf's funding recently and I am sure others are in the works (it does not take much to run a "pure mashup" so many companies may well remain non-venture funded); Extate also took some funding.  I for one am not sure we have seen that company emerge yet.  FWIW Extate is my current favourite (award for best interface and what awards to be the best extraction backend, apparently all crawl and parse).  I see that Saul also feels this way.

One of these new companies has a shot at creating enough traffic momentum to gain in the foothold in the agent listing business or at creating a nice but small sustainable CPC business in vertical search.  But where is the next gorilla ?

technorati tags:property, realestate, extate, zoomf, nestoria, ononemap, saulklein, vecosys, nicbrisbourne

Bebo says Moo too !

A good occasion for some Google Juice back to Robin on the occasion of the partnership between Moo and Bebo.  Building up on the really fantastic success with Flickr and others, Moo's Richard Moross and Bebo's Michael Birch agreed that the community would benefit from this new form of expression.   Offline is the new online !

Virality freak meets design freak and they have lots of cards together

technorati tags:michaelbirch, richardmoross, robinklein, moocards, moo, bebo, flickr

Can Brightcove define a third way ?

The announcement that Brightcove raised a further $59M at $220M post is a clear commitment of its formidable founder, Jeremy Allaire, to take this company to be a large global success. But what might success look like ?

First of all a few comments about Brightcove..

The company has always been focused on enabling the vision of letting 10,000 channels bloom, and so focused on channel creation tools, a fantastic content syndication capability, and of course ad serving into this network.  Beet.tv has a great video of Jeremy Allaire which did beg the question of whether they were trying to do too much, as echoed by Bambi.

And the product itself is really nice. Their player is just fantastic. All the functions embedded in theplayer itself, highly bandwidth efficient, great. And the quality is incredible.

For maximum buzz this funding announcement was followed by the annoucement of a video partnership with Obama. He is almost as good looking as the guy in 24, but too young. One election away in my view. But that is not the topic of the day. He does use the word "conversation a few times and speaks at you, so Jeff Pulver has decided he understands social media.  If I turn out to be a lousy venture capitalist (no comment required :-)), I will go help with the next Belgian election, can't be that hard to do.

Whilst this not exactly breaking news, the Brightcove funding triggered a few questions or thoughts in my mind:

• On the web, simple is best. Whilst I will be the first to recognise that YouTube is not exactly competitive to Brightcove, how do you think GC and Accel felt when YouTube steamed past them and got sold. It is a constant theme of tech and the internet that the simplest, least engineered offerings that "just work" and answer a real consumer yearning always outperform the smartest in the class. Most people I know complained fom the start that you could not find anything on YouTube, that this search paradigm was wrong for video and so on, yet look where it got them.
• Audience, audience, audience: does the Brightcove 10,000 channels approach beat a simple deep reach brand like YouTube ?  And do YouTube's 100,000 non pro Directors create the kind of traffic you can monetise fast, creating the cash machine you need to fill out your backend offering over time ?  Looking through the Brightcove set of channels, I am really not sure these guys are generating the kind of critical mass they need to create serious monetisation.  It was interesting to see Brightcove coming out with its own UGC offering.  the traffic is not anywhere yet, actually their biggest traffic spike seems to have come after some TC juice.
  
• Ad format supply availability: VC is mostly about timing (being right in the long run is not very useful) and my key question around Brightcove is whether the reality of in-video streaming is sufficiently close that they can monetise all this stream inventory before their IRR's head south.  In the meantime, over at YouTube, they do probably do about $3 CPM on probably about 1bn monetised page views every month, so that's I would guess about $3M a month at the very least.  That means your partners keep a smile on their face thanks to the nice revenue share.  It may be that Brightcove negotiates a cut of the classic advertising, but a lot of their channel affiliates did not seem to be delivering any.
• Does programming matter at all ? Call me nu skool, but I really think users are the best programmers.  That's fundamentally the reason why I went in with a team of video nuts called DaillyMotion.
  

Having said all that, the $220M post-money valuation means exit target value must be at least $750M.  With YouTube behind us of course, it is easy to dismiss such numbers.  But that is still a big play.  That means the current course of action must be showing promise.  If Brightcove pulls it off it could really be the network of the future, the google of open video distribution, whilst the UGC video sites slowly lose their momentum.  Now I bet that's got Jim Breyer excited...

technorati tags:brightcove, dailymotion, jeremyallaire, obama

A FON user story that should make Martin happy

My colleague Usman Akram recently became a Fonero.  I have expressed some concerns or doubts about the model in the past, but the buzz is not abating.  I may have to eat my words.  Look at his story so far:

I purchased a FON “Social Router” 3 months ago, making me “Fonero” number 58,360. I paid € 24 for my wireless router and agreed to FON hiring out up to 512 kbps of my precious bandwidth so that I could begin “milking my Wi-Fi”. Over the weekend I discovered that € 5.30 had been credited to my “Piggy Bank”. It turns out some passing “alien” had bought 5, 1-day passes last month on each of 5 consecutive days - one of my neighbours perhaps? The alien paid € 3 on each occasion and my cut was € 1.06.

My economics
I paid out € 24 initially for a Wi-Fi router that would otherwise have cost me ~€ 40. With the credits, my outlay has been reduced to € 19. Looking at my local coverage map, there aren’t many other Foneros in my area, so I’m hopeful about earning future revenue.

The alien’s economics
The alien paid € 3 for each day’s access. Cheaper than most public Wi-Fi spots, but not as cheap as Starbucks.

FON’s economics
On my installation they subsidised my router to the tune of ~ € 20 (€ 16 for the router itself, plus say € 4 of postage). After a revenue share with me, their net revenue on the installation has been € 9.70. So, still down € 10.30 on a marginal unit basis, but it’s only 3 months in.

Atlas’ economics
Should Atlas claim a revenue share on my income? It does pay for my Broadband after all. ;-)
Usman: you bet. 70/30. Watch that paycheck.

technorati tags:fon, martinvarsavsky, fonero

Telco killers killed at birth

I  have been meaning for a while to write some posts about all the companies that are going after the bread and butter of mobile operators by targeting their core services of voice and data, using IP as the Trojan horse.  Hotxt, Mabber, Nimbuzz and ... Berggi.  The mobile telco killers.

A particular virulent post and response from mobilecrunch seems to be attempting to kill one of the telco killers before it's killed anyone, poor Berggi being the victim.  Readers, check out this title: "a business built on bad due diligence".  Wow!  That's blogging for you !  I don't disagree with his comments on a weird pricing strategy, but some of the more generic comments deserve scrutiny.

Oliver focuses on the key issue faced by all of the disruptive mobile players: the need to download.  The issues range from custom API settings to poor install methods to the inability of most phones to run apps in multithreads (meaning you have to shut down the application on all but the high end to run another service).  Olivier is generally saying: if you ain't preloaded and you ain't marketed, you ain't mass market.  In my experience, 70% of mobile downloads fail.  His conclusion is that:

I have never. I repeat, I have NEVER seen an application that was not on a single carrier deck get the kind of massive broad based adoption that would make it a success of the kind necessary for Berggi’s VC’s to feel like the investment was a good one.

Measure, if you will, the distance between MobileCrunch and TechCrunch.  All the complexity and frustration of mobile is in these lines.  Mobile operators, fleecing their customers on excessive voice and SMS roaming charges, are operating in an environment of such complexity that off portal just cannot threaten their core business in the way Skype did in online.

I hope that view is wrong.  It would not be good for innovation in mobile.  The recent success of shozu shows large levels of downloads can be achieved for the right app.  To confirm or dispute what Oliver says, I will start with covering hotxt through a little chat with Carl Uminksi.

Boonty goes disruptive in casual gaming

Mathieu Nouzareth at Boonty, a blogger and  entrepreneur I rate and like, seems to be preparing a nice business extension: a free casual multi-game MMOG.  How he managed to get cafe.com I don't know, but I like the look of this !  Deserves to be succesful and kick Real out of contention.  Mathieu, let's discuss that next round of yours ;-) 

Discovery courtesy of Pascal

technorati tags:boonty, cafe.com, mathieunouzareth, pascalmercier

vpodders unleashed

Ouriel says Rodrigo is about to officially launch vpod.tv and you can get a free Panasonic camcorder as one of the first public users.  Jean-Michel Billaut is a fan.  I used to have a trial account but that was before investing in DailyMotion :-)  It's a well designed product which I assume will follow a mixed Revver-Brightcove positioning.  I am sure the team will do well.

It's nice to see my face on Techcrunch, I hope this does wonders for my traffic...  We partnered with Rodrigo to do the "Future of Web" Elevator Pitch and of course he caught me at 8AM at ETRE after THAT deal happened...

technorati tags:vpod.tv, rodrigosepulveda, billaut, techcrunch, ourielohayon

Video-photo startup funded at €130M

FT Deutschland breaks SevenLoad's funding, which I got courtesy of AC:euro.  It's a stunning deal with an announced valuation of €130M !  Hats off to Axel at Denwkerk and Ibo at SevenLoad for getting this done.

The funding partner is Europe's #3 outside advertising company.  Outside advertising is a good medium to get broad exposure.  A balanced media plan it does not replace, but if you plaster a mid sized city in SevenLoad advertising you're likely to get critical mass pretty quickly.

[Update]: Nico kindly indicates the money comes from Dirk Stroer and not Stroer AG, contrary to what the reports highlighted above indicate.  I will take his word for it, I am sure as a local insider he is more reliable than even the FT.  So the "strategic value" is not an obvious component.  If the deal is cash only rather than cash and in-kind, the valuation number is really amazing.  I really do not believe the €30M T/O + €10M EBIT for next year, it takes longer than that to fully monetize the inventory.

I still have to pinch myself over the valuation given that this site, whilst being of good quality, has yet to achieve virality and traffic.  No room for error if you want to grow into your valuation.  The FT article says the company will consider VC down the line.  I really don't see who would bite at that level, so I hope there is enough of a cash commitment to support the growth until they can monetize.  Sets a nice baseline for discussion with the content owners, should they want some equity.

technorati tags:sevenload, denkwerk

Qipit and Citizen Journalism

Here is Mike Swayne article on "the future of journalism" that has a great quote on qipit, the new product from Realeyes3D:

"I'm not sure where journalism is headed today, with everybody and his dog pretty soon having something like that Qipit system that lets them scan, copy, e-mail, and fax documents with nothing but a camera phone, not to mention in-the-field podcasting and blogging capability. Citizen journalism is here. I'm sure there's still a place for the professional reporter, but the day of the print newspaper is over, and I haven't figured out yet what that means for yours truly."

Talking of Citizen Journalism, I highly recommend spending 10 minutes looking at the US mid-term election videos at the New York Times.  The "attacks" are a fascinating watch.

[NOTE: Apologies for the mangled email message, if seems Feeeburner screwed up]

technorati tags:realeyes3d, qipit

YouTube as viewed from DailyMotion via vpod.tv

Rodrigo catches me having my first coffee of the day right after the announcement of the deal and wants a smart commentary on the YouTube acquisition.  Well, I did my best...

You can view my video here or on ETRE TV, where we talk about copyright, valuation and intermediation as it relates to YouTube.

I will forgive you if by now you are thoroughly confused about the value chain.  Here we have the DailyMotion investor commenting on the YouTube acquisition with the vpod.tv founder ;-)

Google achete Youtube !
Uploaded by 1ere-position

technorati tags:youtube, dailymotion, vpod.tv, rodrigo

Well done Eric "configurable phone" Baissus

A quick word to congratulate Eric Baissus of OpenPlug on the new fundraising.  Eric is a cracking entrepreneur and I wish him and his team all the best with OpenPlug.

The reason why Eric, a TI vet, stands out in my book is that he marries both the deep engineering expertise that is often found in French companies with a proper business head and great dealmaking ability.

OpenPlug was advised by Jean-Michel Deligny at Go4Venture.  Go4Venture is not a state-funded incubator despite the name but a highly professional fundraiser boutique.  JMD publishes a venture capital bulletin which is recommended reading, in which he sometimes even comes close to adding a flippant comment.  Very risque for a fundraiser, although as you can see no risk taken on the dress code ;-)

technorati tags:ericbaissus, openplug, deligny, go4venture

Deal envyy

Win some lose some, but I have to admit, I really wish I had done NetVibes.  Not because it is clear why it is going to beat IG or Live, not because the business model is screamingly obvious, but because it is simply the most useful thing I have come across since email.  Just playing around with the video search tool, I wished, for once, that we had a West Coast office...

technorati tags:netvibes, video

Qipit makes your camera phone useful

Qipit, the consumer service from our company RealEyes3D, launches today at DEMOFall.

Qipit is a new and "lighting fast" way to capture and share written documents with your camera phone or digital camera. Handwritten notes, signed contracts, whiteboards can be transformed into clean, crisp digital copies.  Benoit the CEO is going to pound me for narrowing his positioning, but you can think of it as having a scanner in your pocket.

From an investor standpoint the concept is simple: everyone's got a mobile phone, so how do you make that device more useful to people with simple, generic apps that have mass market appeal ?  Benoit Bergeret and his team have built a nice OEM business with the likes of Samsung, Sanyo and others and have many millions of phones on the market, some with 4 different RE3D apps on the phone.

But once you want to build a direct-to-consumer offering or sell to operators, you run into the usual issues related to device proliferation,  download complexity and so on (APN settings that break your homepage link etc.) not to mention highly variable optics quality, sometimes on the same types of phones.

So we opted for a clean and simple webservice as a start, instead of a downloadable app (which we can do too). 

Qipit competes with ScanR with has the benefit of being US based but has inferior technology (or so our CTO keeps telling me).  They have introduced business card scanning which is neat but which we refrained from doing based on current phone limitations (how many people know how to switch to macro mode ?).  I guess we will have to watch ourselves and not get out-marketed by inferior tech.  But so far we have been very careful to only push out products that met the right quality thresholds so as to protect our audience.

Here is what DEMO says to introduce the company:

Three years ago, a small French company came to DEMOmobile to demonstrate its mobile image capture and correction technology. the company’s work established applications for the mobile phone camera that go well beyond snapshots. Today, Realeyes3D is launching a strong presence in the United States with a robust service that sits at the center of mobile information management. This company is well worth watching as it continues to innovate new uses for the camera-equipped mobile phone.

See, sometimes being small and French is no bad thing.  I hope they do a great job todat at DEMO and will be watching out for the video !  The bar is high since they are former DemoGods...

technorati tags:realeyes3d, qipit, benoitbergeret, scanr, demo, demofall

Moo This ! Offline is the new online

Richard Moross' Moo just launched Flickr Minicards and has been receiving a tremendous reception from the blogosphere.  Think Digital Identity / Social Networks / Whatever represents You encapsulated in a very, very cool card format.  Think Vistaprint for the digital generation.

We funded the company together with Accelerator Group and Index a while back.  If the early take-up rates hold, we are in for a nice ride here !  I can think of a number of digital communities who can offer a nice extension to their members and monetise on the way.

 

Cory Doctorow at Boingboing is waxing lyrical about the service:

It's hard to convey just how cool-ass these cards are. They feel like a fetish object, the thick card and soft laminate finish create a great hand-feel, and they're visually stunning -- playful and intensely personal.

I could not agree more.  You really need to see these in the flesh.  Stefan Magdalinksi's team has really achieved the true elegance required for this type of service to take off.  Here's a takeout from the 37Signals comment stream:

That create and checkout process @ Moo.com is one of the best I’ve ever gone through. Ordered the 10-pack for the Flickr pro users, but I want to order the 100-pack… just to do it again. heh.

We love to print !

technorati tags:moo, richardmoross, flickr

YouTube clone shuns VC and gets investment from ProSiebenSat1

Ever since they turned down the VC's, the market was wondering who was funding myVideo.  It turns out the German YouTube clone has taken an equity injection from ProSiebenSat1 against 30% of the equity with an option on 100%.

The company was set up by the highly successful Samwer brothers (Alando, Jamba) together with some of the management teams they backed in the past, in particular Christian Vollman from iLove.de.

ProSiebenSat.1-Gruppe erwirbt Beteiligung an Deutschlands größter Video-Community "MyVideo"

The press release proudly states that they are now the first German video community.  That's great, but I am not sure what this means since Germany has lagged other countries in this regard and not developed a meaningful local player yet. The press release says the site has up to 2M views a day, which ain't bad and is likely to grow fast if they are hitting virality.

   Das Video-Portal MyVideo.de wächst dynamisch. Pro Woche werden die rund 70.000 Videos, die derzeit bei MyVideo eingestellt sind, ungefähr 12 Millionen Mal abgerufen, pro Tag sind es bis zu zwei Millionen Abrufe. Das Spektrum reicht vom Urlaubsvideo, über selbst gedrehte Musik-Clips bis hin zu eigenproduzierten Kurzfilmen. Jeden Tag kommen etwa 1.800 neue Filme dazu. Die täglichen Zugriffszahlen (Page Impressions) sind von April 2006 bis August 2006 um 560 Prozent gestiegen. Wöchentlich zählt das Netzwerk rund 27 Millionen Seitenzugriffe.

In my book, this is a smart deal for MyVideo for the following reasons:

• your next round is in the bag since Pro7 is unlikely to let you go bust
• nice quick flip strategy with big media
  
• you probably get some "free" TV airtime to build the audience
• you probably get great media agency support and access to advertisers
  

I find the site quite lively but not differentiated in any way.  Chart of the Month includes a bunch of "fun" animation including this top Adolf video (Ich hock in meinem Bonker...).  I guess I am not the target audience...

technorati tags:myvideo.de, prosieben, samwer, christianvollman

Congrats to Christophe on Nokia exit

Great job by the Gate5 team on its exit to Nokia, altough a few of our peers are probably disgruntled at this outcome as the company pursued a dual-track strategy.  It happened to us last year on another opportunity, never nice to be wasting time even when chasing winners.  The terms are not disclosed but if the orginal rumours are still holding this should be a meaningful exit.

Gate5 was founded in 2000 and originally raised money from angels and Europatweb (remember them ??).  A management buy-out occurred in Jan-02 followed by a tiny round in Feb-03 and the key "relaunch" fundraising in Feb-04 courtesy of Innoven and Target Partners (Thomas Balland and Kurt Mueller or Thomas Bleyer, unclear).

Valerie is trying to figure out why they went the Nokia route.  My two cents on this is that valuation and competitive challenges probably tipped the balance in favour of the immediate exit.  Why would Nokia pay up:

• Location-based has been touted as the holy grail and is finally happening.  Companies like Tom-Tom are adding messaging capabilities to their devices; getting a strong software suite in embedded is mission critical for Nokia.  They have historically not been great at developing app software on top of their OS so acquiring is logical.
  
• I am sure Nokia sees real value in killing off the OEM pipeline that the company has built and taking a best-of-breed asset away from the competition
  

Well done Mr Maire we look foward to the next one !

technorati tags:gate5, nokia, christophemaire, innoven, targetpartners

VideoEgg - Bebo TV: can they hold the ramp ?

Like all punters in the market I have been reading the great hypey coverage of the destination sites, YouTube and MySpaceVideo and so on (like this good Mashable example) ...  Given that no one is really charging for content or doing any serious in-video ads, I was wondering what the cash-flow of someone like VideoEgg must look like these days.  I love the concept of building "the Network" and Brightcove and VideoEgg are the most promiment flag carriers in this category.  [BTW here is a funny video of Jeremy Allaire where Rodrigo asks him what he knows about Flash...]

 

A few months back if you had asked me what my favourite type of video company was I would have answered VideoEgg.  But now I am not so sure.  I see that they now power video for Bebo, which means they get to deliver a video on EVERY page of Bebo (and with 25m users and the kind of average page views these sites get, you are talking maybe a couple of ... billion videos per month ?).  The PR says the service is free, so I imagine that they take a slice of the advertising revenue?  How's $1 net CPM pre-split (to be generous) on page ads going to allow these guys to make any money?  And how do you ever embed in-video ad in a Bebo homepage ?

UPDATE: As I finish writing this I decide to check Michael Birch's blog just in case, here is what I find:

Bebo TV Channels	2 hours ago
	What's a TV without Channels? Well now we have thm. There is also a new TV tab at the top of the page, plus many more enhancements to the Bebo TV feature. Watch this space, more to come...

A quick login later and I find myself in front of JAUGCVS (that's Just Another UGC Video Site to you).  It's all converging, scarily fast.  BeboTV = YouTube. 
Now I am even more worried for VideoEgg as I doubt that Bebo pays license fees.

Zyb = "burning hot" contacts backup is also a feature of ShoZu

Morten Lund says "Zyb's hot" (in typically understated Danish style ;-)) and points to coverage at PopGadget and Gizmodo.  Zyb is a contacts backup / share service that's free forever.  That's one up on Fred Wilson's Freemium but then it ain't expensive to deliver.  It's obviously a useful service;  it's based on SyncML so some kind of action is required (I assume) to make sure the synch works.  The only issue I can see which getting so much buzz in the US is that I'll bet it does not work on Verizon

I wanted to point out that "zero click" automatic backup is a feature of ShoZu, one of our babies (well, adolescent / young adult really) that I mentioned before, as a by-product of the abililty to synch rich media and receive off-operator broadcasts.  Here is a partial view of my contacts backup page on Shozu.  I had kind of forgotten about this little plus until reading Morten, so there we go.

technorati tags:zyb, shozu

Viagogo launches with backing from Index

Red Herring broke cover on the funding received by ViaGoGo after its launch yesterday, picked up by Valerie.  Eric Baker, co-founder of StubHub with current CEO Jeff Fluhr, is having another bite at the cherry by taking his original idea to the European market.

This is a large and exciting market; well done to Danny for getting in on the initial funding.  The Viagogo management team looks broad and deep with senior people from Amazon, lastminute, and of course Stubhub.

I understand that the company raised a susbstantial angel round last year, though Red Herring now says ViaGogGo raised a whopping $20M.  StubHub built most of its business on the back of $6.5M in funding; I wonder why they need so much money.  One clue is given by the two exclusive football deals that they announced.  From my (limited) experience with Sporever in France, football clubs only understand upfront cash, so I am assuming they effectively bought inventory off these guys or sponsored them (the way StubHub did in the US).

The football deals are pretty impressive but I must say I was a bit disappointed with the "other inventory".  Not much in rock for example.  Also, if you do a search for Rolling Stones tickets (Twickenham concert is coming up) I get many of their tiny competitors, I even get the real scalpers, but Viagogo essentially does not show up.  I am sure they will fix this over time.

There may bit of a personal thing going on here as well between Fluhr and Baker.  I met in the last few months with Andrew Blachmann who was at Wideray but whose Linked-In profile now says "StubHub Europe".  It looks like a company founder is competing with another here.  The MarketWatch article is more forward on ths point, talking of a "falling out".

Anyway this is an exciting category that will see some pretty exciting developments in the coming months, so stay tuned...

technorati tags:stubhub, viagogo, baker, ticketing

Shozu mobilizes YouTube

As of today you can upload videos to YouTube straight from your mobile using Shozu.  "Shoot and send" without fiddling with controls or MMS is the simple message and the reason why the company won best mobile messaging service at 3GSM this year and at CTIA.

Shozu (funded by Atlas) is a much-loved application that sits on your mobile and acts as a universal gateway to move content on and off your mobile.  You could initially do one-click upload of photos to Flickr and other photo services, as described by a number of prominent bloggers including Russell Buckley or  Rodrigo:

the program is so well embedded in your phone that whenever you take a picture for instance, a popup windows shows up, and asks if you want to post it to a site (I chose Flickr by default).
Hence: open the camera on your phone, shoot with a click, pres OK to upload, and you're done. It has never been so easy to publish content.

From allowing photo uploads to the the photo sharing sites and the blogging platforms, the company is branching out nicely into two way rich media with its new ZuCast zervice.  Anyone with a community can use ZuCast as an elegant means to get photos, videos and music delivered to his/her users.

The company has some very exciting news in the pipe as well with other media partners and is really breaking away from the pack as the best way to get content on and off your mobile.

It also recently added some talent to the team in the form of Steve Langkamp, formerly COO of Magic4.

Netvibes: Go west young man

Well done to Tariq and co for the nice new fundraising.  From my last live conversation with Karim at the NextWeb conference the adventure continues on the West Coast, which explains their choice of Accel Partners.  Well done also to Harry Nelis with whom I have the pleasure of working at KDS, who is involved in the deal.  One of the great things about Karim is how he has kept his cool despite everything that has happened to the company since they went live and got approached by Marc Andreessen within hours of launching.  Great stuff !