Barcamplondon3 - the international meetup Saturday, November 24, 2007

Wow. We've just gone round the roomfor everyone to introduce themself (20 secs inc 3 "tags", mine being money, family and music) and about 35% of the attendees at barcamplondon3 have travelled from outside the UK to attend, with the biggest group from Germany.

Once again, I'm the only VC in the room. Everyone else is a techie of some sort albeit with different degrees of intensity!

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 11:04 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Barcamplondon3 kicks off

Today I'm at my third barcamp - a member of a small band who've been to all of the London ones.

Google are the hosts in their palatial offices. Lavish free restaurant!

The room is packed with folks armed with laptops and cameras(?).

Organised by Ian Forrestor & co-sponsored by BBC Backstage, the event runs for 36hrs.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:42 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



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.

Labels: , , ,

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

newsvine reddit



Charles River Ventures startup scheme - a marketing con? Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Paul Kedrosky reports that the Charles River Rivers much heralded startup scheme offering a $250,000 venture loan program and which launched late last year has been very disappointing. Stats to date are:
As Paul observes, these are lousy odds.

So, was it just one heck of a cheap marketing campaign to endear oneself to the tech community.

Or was it that they applied the same valuation techniques to startups as they do to their usual investments and found the price:risk ratio off the scale?

Or was it that they received a ton of trash from highly unsuitable chancers with dreadful ideas, that read about the scheme? Bear in mind that most VCs don't look at unsolicited pitches, preferring to rely on trusted sources to refer businesses. For these VCs, you would expect the ratios to be significantly higher.

Wouldn't it be great if all the applications could be posted to an public site for wider scrutiny. If the entrepreneurs consented, it's possible they could find other firms/angels that are willing to talk to them.

I suspect most applicants would be terrified by this notion, fearful that their "unique" idea would be stolen. However, as I explained a couple of weeks ago at Barcamp London, ideas are rarely unique and often benefit from "sunlight" (slidedeck is here http://www.slideshare.net/johndwilson/sex-the-investor). Moreover, if your idea is so simple to copy and exploit, that in itself may well be a deterrent to investors.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 8:51 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



My presentation at Barcamp Sunday, February 18, 2007

As you may be aware, every attendee at Barcamp must contribute usually in the form of a talk/presentation on a topic of their choosing.

So, here's the slide deck of mine, which I gave on Sat 17th Feb at Barcamp London 2 entitled "Sex & the Investor"



My presentation from Barcamp London 1 is below, on the subject of "trust" networks

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 7:25 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Barcamp is back in London Thursday, January 18, 2007

Labels:

posted by John Wilson @ 11:31 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit