Minibar tonight (2 Mar) Friday, March 02, 2007

Tonights Minibar seemed less full for some reason albeit 132 folk were signed up on Meetup. Demos tonight.

From a selfish perspective Minibar is a clear second to Opencoffee because
- too many geeks pushing tech solutions & not businesses at minibar
- its simply too dark & noisy (loud DJ) to network
- people don't go to network
- tech is the focus, not entrepreneurship

Anyway, the usual format of demos operated with the following companies presenting tonight.:

Sellaband
- its provides a platform to provide finance to new bands to help launch themselves & produce their first album
- they advance that labels are risk averse & talent struggles to be heard. Yet some consumers like to discover stuff.
- Sellaband enables passionate "believers" to buy fractions in bands they like/discover up to a max of $50k to fund their recordings. No commitment applies on either side until $50k is reached and then both sides are locked in. Sellaband the organises studio time & recordings.
- The believer's investment buys firstly albums ($10 per unit) which they get delivered - god forbid you invest $1k & end up with loads of CDs..
- The music is then given away by Sellaband on the site to drive traffic & generate ad revenues which is shared between investors & the band.
- So far 2 artists raised have raised the $50k, with 400k of pledges. 7500 investors have signed up & 2500 artists. Page views of several hundred thousand have resulted.
- artists get their own promo page with embedded player. Consumers hear music for free but can choose to invest.
- However, here's were the deal goes sour. Investors only get rights to the ad revenues on sellaband. Ooops. So my investment gets them the necessary push and they go onto greatness - sorry, you get nothing!

Apologies if I misunderstood the model (I did check with those around me) but what a lousy deal. If my money promotes a band & helps them get big, I want a share to payoff all of the flops I backed.

Spikesource
It's a non profit consortium dedicated to promoting open source and minising risk of using open source.

Flirtnik
"Smart personal for smart people". Translated it sounded like a social network site targeted at people searching for casual sex. Can't deny there's probably a market.

Rouq
Developed by one of the Barcamplondon organisers, Jason, they offer a search engine that geographically divides up search results but their USP is that results are returned as images of the web pages. Search is driven by yahoo results. Whilst some searches might benefit from visuals, the selection seemed to push people towards the best visually stunning site. Their pitch lacked clarity, especially as the first two minutes of five were devoted to talking about their testimonials on other sites.

Trusted Places
Still flush from their £500k of funding this week, Sokratis and Walid introduced their site. Their sites provides a trust network for finding recommendations of places to go (bars, restaurants mainly). Using the "neighbour" concept, Trusted Places finds recommendations from people with similar profiles (profile data driven by upfront questionnaire). This isn't trust per se since it actually uses Amazon-like filtering to say people like you, like this. This is different from people whom you know giving you recommendations.

Trusted places look to make money from advertising & sponsorship.

It was great to see Helen Keegan (Swedish Beers & beepmarketing) and Deirdre Molloy (Chinwag) for a long chat. I also saw/spoke with
- Ian Delaney who replaced Deirdre as NMK editor
- Sophie Coudray of Antersite
- Angel at Inkpak
- Jemima of the Guardian Unlimited
- Simon of Bellhope
- Caz of rugbypix.com

It was also good to see one of the co-founders of Last.fm, Martin, coming along.

Well done to Christian for his continued efforts in making this event happen.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:55 PM Permanent Link ,

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London Minibar is huge Friday, January 26, 2007

Tonight the signup list was closed at 170 people, double the number from Dec 06. A packed bar saw demos/talks from:

- www.drupal.org; content mgt platform including blog facilities; collaboration tools; web devt platform for the open source community with 100k users. Drupal purports to act as the glue for web projects. It's now on v5.
- www.tioti.com; tape it off the internet a web site that aggregates data about tv shows & where you might download them. Its 12 months old & all content is user generated. Lots of broadcasters reportedly are making their content (back library) available online for download. Using friend recommendation concept, you can discover new stuff & comment on it. 13k beta users with public access due next week. Paul, the founder, claims there will be no copyright issues for them (really!) & will rely on advertising for its revenues.
- www.MODfilms.net are looking to be a film licence convergence orchestrator! Mixing up all kinds of film & animation content with interactive uses. A proponent of semantic web, they want to provide a means of tagging contents & linking between content items. Unusually they are aiming to invest time to encourage/promote use of creative commons licences amongst content producers for derivatives of their product. Suggested you also check out Trailermash.com which is an authority on content mashups
- www.platoniq.com From Barcelona they are focussed on "sharing media in public spaces". They advocate opensource copyleft music distribution & a common bank of knowledge.
- wikidot.com allows you to edit webpages! Like wikipedia but a one-man band done in 6 months. It has 8000 users with 3500 wikis & 90,000 pages. All done for $1k.
- Ester Dyson, ex CNET & recent non-exec of of etribes. Speaking on tech investing she asked how will your site make money! Are you a lifestyle entrepreneur or money mad? Running companies is hard - her 10 companies face the same issues as any business. She believes investors expect 1 out of 10 to be a hit & 3 limping through. Brands have to be built & deliver an experience. She was asked is social change more important than ROI. Answer - social change can deliver ROI as a byproduct.

Christian, who organises the event, announced that Google is sponsoring a film competition under creative commons licence.

Sorry for the bitty notes, but this liveblogging!

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posted by John Wilson @ 8:04 PM Permanent Link ,

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