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High Profile Startup Launch Opportunities Abound

Posted on April 16, 2007 ·

There’s certainly no shortage of high-profile opportunities for startups nowadays. 

The creme de la creme is no doubt Demo where 70 startup can pitch, get courted by VC’s and enjoy unprecedented publicity. High profile, professional, and (almost) prohibitively expensive.  You essentially have to be already funded or bring in significant revenue to be able to afford it.  Fortunately there is a growing number of affordable alternatives.

Under the Radar is a well-established conference series presented by Dealmaker Media (formerly known as IBDNetwork). After the recent, successful Office 2.0 event, the next UtR is focusing on Entertainment and Media on June 28th.  If this is your field, hurry up there are 4 days left for registration. Clarification: the April 20th deadline is for submitting your company as a presenter, attendee registration is open right till the event itself.

SVASE, the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, expanded it’s scope of events last year with the joint Launch: Silicon Valley / Art of the Start mega-event jointly put up with Garage Technology Ventures. Guy Kawasaki calls Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 “the poor man’s Demo” and recommends you get in early. Submission deadline here is May 3rd – see more information in my earlier post. 

Finally, a “newborn”:  Mike Arrington just announced TechCrunch20, a conference he is co-producing with Jason Calacanis in September, where “twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this.”  Submission deadline to this event is May 30th.

Summing up, in the order of occurrence:

  • Launch: Silicon Valley, June 5th, 30 startups, deadline May 3rd.
  • Under the Radar,  June28th, 32 startups, deadline April 20th.
  • TechCrunch20, September 17-18th, 20 startups, deadline May 30th.

Sounds like a “busy” summer to me smile_regular

 

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Marketing / PR, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Freshbooks Launches Benchmarking Service: SaaS Will Never Be the Same

Posted on April 16, 2007 ·

Way back at the Office 2.0 conference FreshBooks CEO Mike McDerment dropped a bomb in the last 20 seconds in his presentation: being software as as service, they can aggregate customers’ data, categorize it by industry, size ..etc, and once they do that, why not turn it into a service, providing customers with their own performance metrics as well as benchmarking them against their peers.

A few months later, the Small Business Report Card service will launch tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Expo as well as online. The service will be free to all Freshbooks customers, who will:

  • all receive their own performance metrics, and
  • if they select their peer group based on (currently) 80 types of business / professions, geography and several other business criteria, they will also receive their relative position, “score-card” within that group.

The sample below is a mock-up of the actual Report Card, but is shows the initial metrics reported. Clearly, as they further enhance the program, there will be more and more criteria, and FreshBooks customers will have a say in what performance metrics they find valuable.

Remember, FreshBooks’ customers are mostly small businesses who don’t have an army of MBA-types crunch the numbers and look for business (in)efficiencies. In fact it’s probably fair to say some would not even know how to interpret the numbers, until they are put in prospective – hence the value of relative benchmarking.

But why will SaaS never be the same? This isn’t just about FreshBooks and its customers.

It’s *the* hidden business model enabled by SaaS. An opportunity not talked about, but so obvious it has to be on the back of all SaaS CEO’s mind. Benchmarking is a huge business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as by specialized shops like the Hackett group – none of which are affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. SaaS providers will have access to the most authentic data ever, aggregation if which leads to the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.

Being pioneers always carries a risk, and clearly, Freshbooks will have to keep an eye on their customers feedback. There may be a backlash due to data privacy/ownership concerns; some customers will not opt in, they may even lose some customers entirely. But I believe the majority will see the light and benefit from the service. If Mike’s blog post on the subject is any indication, the feedback there was overwhelmingly positive, with 13 comments for, 3 against.

I suspect a year or two from now benchmarking based on aggregate customer data will be standard industry practice, and little (?) FreshBooks will be looked upon as the pioneers who opened up the floodgate of opportunities.

Last, but not least a word on the creative launch – or a lesson on how to launch from a conference you don’t officially participate atsmile_wink:

Yugma is a web-conferencing company and an exhibitor at Web 2.0 Expo. What better way to demo a web-conferencing product than by showing real-live use… without Yugma having to move a finger to create content. They created Stage 2, a platform for companies to showcase their products remotely at the Yugma booth and simultaneously to the World through a Net broadcast. Both the presenters and Yugma win – congrat’s, and my personal Creativity Award to Yugma thumbs_up

Update (4/19): read Jeff Nolan’s comments.

Update (10/8/2008):  Congrat’s to Freshbooks for getting on  Fox Business.

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Microsoft Patches Outlook, Creates PR Nightmare

Posted on April 15, 2007 ·

Computerworld reports that Microsoft issued a patch to deal with Outlook 2007’s sluggishness, this time for real.

“I can’t say that this will 100 percent solve the latency issues, but users should see a big improvement,” – says Jessica Arnold, Outlook’s program manager.

 Why won’t it solve the latency problems?  Because they were largely introduced by design changes to accomodate:

  • RSS handling – a new feature.
  • Indexing – fixing what hasn’t worked for years, i.e. finding email.

So, is Microsoft saying it’s the improvements that brought Outlook down to its knees? Ouchsmile_sad

Arnold said that while Microsoft had started hearing about problems even before Outlook’s release to businesses last November, “until we had enough users, the data wasn’t clear.”

Oh, I’ve got it now.  This is Microsoft’s way of becoming Web 2.0 complient: “Release early, release often” – don’t test, I might add.  Sorry Microsoft, this works for startups with early-adopter techno-enthusiast users, not for the corporate world’s #1 communication platform. And where’s the “Beta” moniker, anyway?

“Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool,”  – says Arnold, recommending users archive their email often, reducing the size of their .PST file.

Yeah, right. For years I bought into that, and was a religious auto-archiver.  There’s only one problem with that concept: we’re not storing old email for the sake of having it: it’s for the occasional need to actually find old information.  Have you tried to open an archive.pst file?  Since the contents are not kept up-to-date in your index, you can launch “find”, than take a coffee-beak.  Better yet, go for lunch.plate

Archiving, limiting storage was indeed the only solution for a long while.  But now there is a better one.  Ever since I’ve dumped Outlook, moved ALL my archives to Gmail, my PC is fast (desktop index, online backup, virus checker all have less to do) I have an efficient, fast email system, and can retrieve any email sent/received in the past ten years in a second.  That’s the real solution to Outlook’s performance problems.

I’ll take it one step further: for doc, spreadsheet, presentation needs I use the Zoho Suite.  Signing documents: EchoSign.  Incidentally, I am typing this on an offline editor, while sitting on BART, on my way to the first Web 2.0 Expo session: Ismael Ghalimi presenting how he runs his business entirely on Web-based services.

Update (4/16): Built For vs. Used For by Jeff Nolan.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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FireFox Not Your Default Browser – After Windows Update… Again?

Posted on April 11, 2007 ·

Another dose of Windows updates, exactly a week after the previous set, thank you Microsoft, I’m having funsmile_baringteeth

  • Security Update for Windows XP (KB931784)
  • Security Update for Windows XP (KB931261) 
  • Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB932330) 
  • Security Update for Windows XP (KB930178) 
  • Security Update for Windows XP (KB932168)

Dear Microsoft, could you please kill he annoying pop-up that wants me to reboot every 15 minutes or so?  When you take weeks to fix bugs, the World will not come to an abrupt end if those updates take effect a few hours later.  I *own* this PC and it’s my time, when I already told it I would reboot later, stop bugging me!

OK, so I give up, rebooting now… back .. starting FireFox, the “usual” message: 

“FireFox is NOT your default browser … etc.”

Wait, I’m not falling for it.  After last time, both Microsoft and Mozilla contacted me, and together they determined that Microsoft did NOT hijack the browser, FireFox was indeed still the default browser, the problem was in a check that FireFox should not perform. 

While I can’t know what’s going on now, I suspect the ball may be in Mozilla’s court – time to reopen that bug report.

 

 

Filed Under: Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Webmail: PC Magazine Confuses Productivity with Popularity

Posted on April 11, 2007 ·

PC Magazine compares the 3 major Webmail providers: AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and makes the summary call of declaring Gmail “left behind” – without reviewing Gmail.  How funny.

They key criticism is that – unlike the other three -, Gmail does not have the look-and-feel of Microsoft’s “killer” Outlook. Wow. That’s quite a statement.  I fail to see Outlook a killer product, it simply is a the dominant product on the market, and will remain so for quite a while simply due to Microsoft’s weight.  By the way, I recall the time when Lotus 1-2-3 was a market leader. Or Wordstar.  Or dBase II.

While not giving Gmail a dedicated review section, PC Mag refers to it as part of the discussion on Yahoo Mail:

“Gmail, beta for life (or at least three years so far, is beloved by millions (including me), and still has cachet though it lacks AJAX features, isn’t easy to use, and doesn’t have a sensible sorting ability”

I agree and disagree. Yes, Gmail is not easy to use if you’ve just come from the world of Outlook, Yahoo..etc. No, Gmail is easy to use once you “get it” – in fact at that point you will start seeing just how hard-to-use the other products are.  

Sorting, for example is the “poor-emailer’s” tool for finding information.  You can spend looong minutes sorting, scrolling up-and-down, trying to piecemeal together a conversation thread from your Inbox, Sent Mail and various other folders.  Or you can just pull the entire thread up by smart use of labels and keyword search.  (of course in Outlook I would only attempt a search when it’s time for a coffee-break).

PC Mag talks a lot about drag-and-drop and other bells and whistles – I agree, these are nice, but when it comes to productivity, there are 3 fundamental reasons Gmail beats all:

  • Threaded Conversations: in business conversations last weeks, include dozens of emails, and are basically a pain to put together before you respond to someone.  Gmail handles it automagically, and as a side-effect, it presents a lot more information on it’s list screen – since the dozen individual emails are now compressed into one line.  (Oh, and don’t forget the nifty feature of picking up the first line of the email body, instead of dumbly repeating the subject line)
  • Labels.  Folders are a crime. How often do you feel the need to file an email to several folders, yet you can’t.  Logical grouping and physical storage of email have nothing to do with each other, need to be de-coupled, and that’s exactly what Gmail does.  You can assign multiple labels to any email, pull of conversation based on labels, and your labels can still give you a sense of ‘folders’ by having them listed on the left pane.
  • Search. Find. That simple.   I can pull up email on any subject from 1999 before you even start thinking of which folder to look into, how to sort, scroll in Outlook.

 

Does this make Gmail a better product?  Certainly, for me.  Perhaps not for you. 

Not everyone needs productivity.  Not everyone wants to go through a paradigm change.  AOL, YAHOO, Hotmail are the absolute market leaders,and they should do whatever it takes to keep their customers.  Their mainstream users are corporate employees who use Outlook in the Office, whether they like it or not is irrelevant, they are used to it. When they go home, they may not email a lot. Some will check their emails daily, once a week, or less. They want a personal email that resembles to what they already know.  Familiarity is more important than productivity.

Gmail is for the frequent users and increasingly for people who use it to conduct their business: in other words, the productivity-freaks like yours truly.  Or Web Worker Daily’s Anne Zelenka, who rightly states:   GMAIL: NOT BEHIND, JUST GOING IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION.

 

Update: If you’re thinking of migrating to Gmail but can’t figure out how to deal with years of email history, check out my guide: How to Import All Your Archive Email Into Gmail.

Update: Webware reports on a prize fight between Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

 

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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Koral Acquired by Salesforce.com

Posted on April 9, 2007 ·

Wow, this was fast. I met Koral CEO Mark Suster some time in November, when he gave me a demo of his then pre-beta Content Collaboration system. I instantly liked it, largely for it’s simplicity – hence the title of my review: Koral – Collaborative Content Management without the Hassle of “Management”.

Apparently I was not the only one who liked the productsmile_regular. Koral is no more. Salesforce.com has acquired it, launching its new service … hm, SalesforceContent, or Apex Content, or Salesforce ContentExchange – apparently there is a bit confusion over the name, but we’ll know it tomorrow for sure. The logo is from the (former) Koral site:

Update: Clarification from CEO Mark Suster:

“The overall initiative is called Salesforce Content. That consists of the Apex Content platform where developers will be able to build their own content based applications and Salesforce ContentExchange, which is a Web 2.0 application for managing corporate content that sits on top of this platform.
Basically, we took an integrated product, Koral, and split it out into a platform piece for developers and an application piece ready to sell to customers.”

TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb and ZDNet has all the details. Congratulations, Mark, Tim and the rest of the team!

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 – Call for Startups

Posted on April 5, 2007 ·

Startup Entrepreneurs who did not make it to the recent Under the Radar event, here’s your second chance: join us at Launch: Silicon Valley 2007, co-presented by SVASE and Garage Technology Ventures.

In fact it will be more than a second chance: while the UtR event focused specifically on the Office 2.0 space, Launch 2007 is designed to uncover and showcase products and services from the most exciting of the newest startups in information technology, mobility, security, digital media next generation internet, life sciences and clean energy.   The inaugural Launch event was in 2006, combined with Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start conference. 

Are these events worth attending?  The startup CEO’s who got their “breakthrough” at last year’s Launch certainly think so:

Faraz Hoodbhoy, CEO, PixSense, Inc:

”Since L:SV (November 8, 2006) we closed series A with Innovacom and ATA and have gone on to win large customer deals across the Telco and mobile social networking world. We’re growing significantly and are now looking at closing a new round of funding as well that we will announce sometime early next month.

On the team side, we’re up to well over 50 people and are looking to be over 120 by end of this year across the globe. We currently have people on the ground in Santa Clara, Beijing, Karachi, Tokyo and soon to expand to Hong Kong, Paris, London, Dubai and Bombay.

So things are going quite well so far. Thanks much for giving us the opportunity to present at L:SV; it was indeed a very good show for us.

Sincerely, Faraz”

Vajid Jafri, Founder & CEO, cFares:

“Launch: Silicon Valley was an extremely valuable event for cFares, as it was there that we met the firm that subsequently became the lead investor in our latest round of finance. We would not have achieved as much progress as we have without Launch: Silicon Valley.”

So if you are building the Next Great Business in the areas mentioned above, are (almost) ready for launch, meaning that by June 5, 2007 you will have a product or service available, but have not been out in the marketplace for more than a few months, then by all means send an Executive Summary of no more than 2 pages to Launchsv@svase.org. Submission deadline: May 3, 2007.  Last year over 150 companies from New York, Colorado, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, and the UK, as well as from the West Coast of the USA applied, so clearly the presentation spots are in high demand. (Garage Technology offers a useful Writing a Compelling Executive Summary guide)

Every Executive Summary will be evaluated by at least 2 members of the Advisory Board, composed of leading members of the Silicon Valley investment community. Following these evaluations, up to 30 companies will be invited to present at the Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 event on June 5 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, California.  Presentations slots are 10 minutes, running in 6 sessions of 5 companies each.  Each presenting team will also be assigned a cocktail table in the Networking Room where they can meet with interested audience members one-on-one to answer questions and explore possibilities.

CEOs of the companies voted “most promising new company” in each of the six sessions at the event will also receive invitations (for two) to attend the prestigious Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” Gala Dinner on June 29 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

On the evening on June 4, the presenting companies, registered audience and selected bloggers and media will be invited to a Pre-Event Party at a prestigious location in Palo Alto, providing a further opportunity for networking with Silicon Valley’s movers and shakers.

Guy Kawasaki calls Launch: Silicon Valley “the poor man’s Demo” and recommends you get in. SVASE proudly wears that badge, since we’re bringing this event at a price that won’t keep any startup away.  It’s your turn now: send in the Executive Summary and launch with us in June.

Update (4/12): AlwaysOn: If you launch your product and no-one notices… 

 

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Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Marketing / PR, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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We Will Be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.

Posted on April 4, 2007 ·

“In the future we’re all going to become gofers for computers.” – says ZDNet’s Larry Dignan on the new Amazon patent for  a “Hybrid machine/human computing arrangement.”

Nick Carr describes it as a cybernetic mind-meld a’la Mechanical Turk.

The patent covers “a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist a computer to solve particular tasks, allowing the computer to solve the tasks more efficiently.”

Humans assisting computers, not the other way around.

This ain’t no Turk anymore Nick.  It’s The Borg.

We Will Be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.

 

 

Filed Under: Humor, Technology ·
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FireFox Flocked: Feature Glut vs. Performance

Posted on April 4, 2007 ·

Mozilla has released the scoop on Coop (sorry, couldn’t resist), a product that will incorporate social networking right into the FireFox browser.

This cannot be good news to social browser Flock (originally built on Mozilla) says TechCrunch. (Flock is another story on it’s own right: pre-release over-hype, underwhelming early beta, still waiting for a 1.0 product). Not everyone thinks Flock is .. well, *flocked*, for example Matthew Ingram and Mark Evans think the more competition the better.

But there is a bigger story here. The initial reaction on TechCrunch is almost unanimously negative – and it’s not the typical Arrington-bashing pile-on.

  • “I hope they offer a version without. I want a browser, not a social network.”
  • “I’d rather see them address the resource-hogging issues in Firefox. If social-networking features cause it to use any more system resources, I’ll need a freakin’ dedicated server just to browse the web.”
  • “It does sound exciting but why does Mozilla want to add further memory hogging features in firefox.”
  • “I don’t want anything more in Firefox until they stop it consuming 98% of my CPU cycles.”
  • “Firefox is still a resource hog. I’d rather see that fixed before it becomes a social browser.”

Clearly, users want their browsers to work reliably, fast, without becoming a resource-hog. I’ve said before, performance is a feature, and apparently it’s becoming feature #1 for many – yours truly included. I must be getting old, not getting this social “networking 24×7” – heck, I don’t even watch Justin.tv smile_omg

Now, to be real, I’m sure (?) Coop will be an optional add-on, so those who don’t want it can continue with a more lightweight browser. But this mini-revolt at TechCrunch is a good reminder that the memory-hog issue has been present and largely unaddressed by Mozilla for years. I think it also offers a lesson to any software company: even your most religious fans/users can easily jump ship if either something better comes along, or you “flock” up badly.

Related posts: Startup Meme, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Infocult, Techscape, mathewingram.com/work, Mashable!, Mark Evans, Compiler, franticindustries, 901am, CenterNetworks, Between the Lines, The Social Web and more …

Filed Under: Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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Technorati vs. Google Blog Search and the Conversation

Posted on April 3, 2007 ·

Mirror mirror on the wall, which blog search is best of them all? – asks Robert Scoble.  My answer is very simple:

Technorati has by far more features, they continue to be the innovation leader. It is because of these features that I force myself to use Technorati, day by day – but it’s a painful experience (despite availability graphs Dave Sifry likes to quote).

Google Blog Search has one very convincing “feature”: it works. Always. And fast. 

When I say fast, I mean the speed of accessing data: it’s instantaneous, vs. the looooong wait for Technorati.  How fast the two engines index new blog posts is a different matter – but to me it’s secondary.   Scoble’s example clearly shows Technorati as winner:

Technorati for videobloggingweek2007. 147 results.

Google Blog Search for videobloggingweek2007. 76 results.

However, checking those very same links after a while shows:

Technorati for videobloggingweek2007. 183 results.

Google Blog Search for videobloggingweek2007. 209 results.

Google is known to quietly add features without major announcements.  The “biggie” to me is that Google Blog Search now finds comments left on any blog.  Everybody says blogging is a conversation, yet half the conversation has been impossible to find so far. CoComment, co.mments are nice tools, but blog search engines have largely ignored comments until now.  I’d say this is the first feature showing Google “out-innovate” Technorati.

I’m  not sure Technorati cares a lot about head-to-head comparisons.  After all, they no longer want to be the blog search company – they aim to become a media company.

Update (4/3): TechCrunch thinks Technorati’s doing a mating dance.  Since I repeatedly called for a White Knight to acquire Technorati,  I’d be quite happy to see this mating dance work…

 

Filed Under: Blogging, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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