Global Nerdy

A little late to this item, but I think it's a bellweather for the startup market, so I'd be remiss in not commenting on this story from VentureBeat: 

Charles River Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, has launched a new investment strategy, offering rapid but tiny $250,000 checks to Internet start-ups.

The program, called QuickStart, recognizes times have changed, and that Internet companies no longer need the vast amounts of cash that most venture capital firms want to give to them. The CRV program also offers entrepreneur the friendly terms of the “convertible” seed round.

Of CRV’s last five deals, four were seed rounds (three consumer Internet companies, and one chip intellectual property company). The partners acknowledged that some deals — such as solar companies — need millions. But they said a majority of the deal leads they see these days falls into this seed category.

CRV is just reacting to the fact that conditions are very different for startups today. They don't need to spend a lot on non-differentiating infrastructure and platforms, they can rely on a lot of individual word of mouth for marketing driven by blogs and wikis, and it's easier to deliver rich user experiences through standard browser clients. All of this lowers the barrier to entry in the software business to historically low levels. You don't need millions to invest in deep, proprietary platforms on which you'd build your business. VCs whose stock in trade was raising billions and investing millions were getting themselves frozen out of this segment of the market.

The reaction to the CRV news has mostly been positive, but two of the more prominent early-stage VCs have made a couple of interesting observations. Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital says:

I've always believed that one of the key roles a seed-stage investor plays is to help their portfolio companies raise a Series A round.  One of the reasons I don't like bridge loans, is that there is not alignment of interest between the lender and the entrepreneur.  As a lender, I would convert into the price of the next round — motivating me to keep the next round valuation low.  As a shareholder, my motivation is aligned with the entrepreneur — we both get rewarded by a higher second round valuation.

In other words, as a lender with an option to convert into an owner, a Series A financing has your seed lender acting like a potential investor, rather than as an existing owner. The difference is simple and important: potential investors want to buy low, while existing owners want to sell high.

There's also the question, raised by Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, of whether a big firm like CRV has the bandwidth to give these tiny opportunities the TLC they'll need to move from idea to product.

[W]e really want to engage with each and every investment we make. I read comments all the time on my blog and elsewhere that suggest that the new environment rewards firms that can make a much larger number of investments because web services are capital efficient and you can do more with less. Well that may be true, but we have been rewarded the most over the years when we engage deeply with a company and we are not going to lessen the engagement simply to get more names in the portfolio without thinking long and hard about the tradeoffs.

While some firms are quitting the scene, in part because of the new financial dynamics, it's nice to see another VC graybeard try to adapt to the new reality.

Link

Tags: VC, seed, bridge loan, Charles River Ventures, CRV Quick Start

A quick post that will betray my Canadian roots:

The National Hockey League has annunced a new multi-year video content deal with Google Inc., making full-length games from the '06-07 season and some classic games available for online purchase on a 48-hour, tape-delay basis.

"This is obviously an on-demand world where people want what they want, when they want it, and where they want it," said NHL Interactive CyberEnterprises President Keith Ritter. "Google is a place where we definitely need to be."

Discussions about a future video content deal with Apple are still ongoing, Ritter said, as are efforts to offer live streaming of games online.

No word on whether Don Cherry will get his own show on Google Video, where he criticizes European search engines.

With MLB.com being touted as the belle of the online sports media ball, it's no surprise that the NHL is trying to get their digital ice, uh, Zamboni-ed? Whatever. I'm just happy I'll be able to follow Les Habitants from afar without having to buy a whole slate of games that are of no interest to me.

The videos will be free for the next two weeks, so drop the gloves!

Link

Tags: NHL, Google, video

Normally, TechCrunch breaks stories but today it would seem that Mike Arrington's budding technology news empire is the story. A Crunchnote from Arrington posted earlier today says:

The last two weeks has brough a fresh wave of TechCrunch hate. I’ve learned to avoid responding to this stuff in the past because it just draws more attention to it, but tonight a reporter from the Syndey Morning Herald named Asher Moses emailed me and said “First off, great site – i’m a regular reader of yours.” He then went on to say he’s working on a story about the “disclosure scrubbed at techcrunch debacle.”

I took issue with his use of the term “debacle” before actually speaking to me – this tells me everything I need to know about this particular reporter’s slant on this “story,” and basically told him to fuck off. And while I’m not surprised that someone is looking to do a hit job on TechCrunch, I am surprised that traditional media is starting to see TechCrunch as newsworthy enough to attack. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

With regards to the actual details of the angle the Herald has on their (yet-to-be published) story—that Arrington ignores news about startups who compete with companies he and his friends have an interest in—I have nothing to offer than my observation that TechCrunch seems to do right by their readers with disclosure. In other words, I won't quibble when Arrington says:

My record is clean. I call things like I see them. I disclose financial conflicts. I’ve complimented direct competitors to a startup I founded (see here and here), edgeio. I’ve slammed sponsors (see my comments on ReviewMe). There’s a very good chance I am going to rip apart a startup I invested in when it launches soon if they don’t get their shit together.

Still, this is an interesting situation, and Mike, in this post at least, isn't giving the debate its due. He's setting this up as the latest skirmish in an MSM vs Bloggers civil war, a position that both aggrandizes the Herald article (when it's really a non-story) and downplays the more serious and larger issue of how a financial insider can play the news game.

TechCrunch is a media company. A news outlet. A tipsheet. Perhaps a combination of all three. It also happens to be produced in part by a person who's an active investor in the industry, and while he clearly discloses his interest in companies when he writes about them, he doesn't necessarily talk about his investments when the subject is the competition. That's not a conflict for the Wall Street Journal (and, I assume, the Sydney Morning Herald), but a new one that a company like TechCrunch creates. That's one of the main points of a rather long Nick Carr post on ethics, blogging, and TechCrunch from earlier this month. And much as it pains me to agree with Nick Carr, I find myself doing so at his conclusion:

When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility. In this area, as in others, blogs have far more to learn from newspapers than newspapers have to learn from blogs.

Which is the point that journobloggers Matt Ingram and Heather Green make: There's a real debate here about how newly-powerful chroniclers of the blogging age should best serve their readers, but it's not at all aided by a false Revolutionaries vs Dinosaurs argument. Traditional journalists have personal relationships, political considerations, and financial relationships, too. They've developed standards and conventions that help them deal with these issues, and bloggers would be foolish to ignore them.

Link

Tags: TechCrunch, Arrington, conflict of interest, transparency, journalism, ethics

This CNN report says that according to Netcraft, there are now 100 million web sites:

There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England,
began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to
reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100
million, late in the month of October 2006.

This calls for a graph! Here's one from Netcraft, which shows both hostnames and “active” sites, from August 1995 to the present day:

That's a lot of pictures of kittens and porn.

Netcraft lists these previous milestones:

• April 1997: 1 million
  sites
• February 2000: 10 million sites
• September 2000: 20 million sites
• July
  2001: 30 million sites
• April 2003: 40 million sites
• May 2004: 50 million sites
• March 2005: 60 million sites
• August 2005: 70 million sites
• April 2006: 80
  million sites
• August 2006: 90 million sites

Greg Sterling offers his thoughts on this latest milestone:

This all means that there’s more and more noise online and it’s only
getting “worse.” I’ve been talking about that in the limited context of
local. But the general cacophony of new and me-too sites and services
only means that brands and habitual behavior become more powerful;
people will fall back on what they like, know and trust rather than try
new things.

The idea that “our competition is only a click away” only really
means something if you’re a no-name site. It’s very different if you’re
Google or Yahoo (or even MySpace now).

People talk about “the Internet” in the same way they discuss “the
small business market.” There is no “small business market,” there are
only 10 or 14 or 17 or 20 million small businesses, with some shared
characteristics. Similarly, “the Internet” is not a monolith, but 100
million websites.

Thus those would would “aggregate the tail” (whether eyeballs,
publishers/site or marketers) are thus increasingly important to the
online ecosystem.

Link

Apple's current mobile iTunes partner, Cingular Wireless, is going to raise the bar on their music offerings:

Cingular Wireless is expected to team up with online music services, including Napster Inc., Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Inc.'s Yahoo Music and eMusic, to launch a music service on its cellphone network, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The move by Cingular, jointly owned by AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and BellSouth (BLS.N: Quote, Profile, Research), may set the stage for a battle with Apple Computer's (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Ipod. The service would work on cellphones that double as music players.

According to the Journal story Reuters cites, the most interesting thing Cingular's new service will allow for is synchronization with Napster's and Yahoo!'s Windows Media-based subscription services where, for a monthy fee, customers have access to the entire catalog of music these services offer. This would be in addition to playback of individual song downloads from Napster, Yahoo!, and eMusic, and tracks ripped from a customer's audio CDs. The Journal also says that An Over The Air (OTA) music download service from Cingular (like the ones offered by other carriers like Verizon and Sprint)  is purported to be in the works for next year. I suppose the goal would be to allow Cingular customers to buy tracks from Napster, Yahoo!, and eMusic while mobile.

This reads, for now, like not much more than an extra bit of distribution for Napster and Yahoo! Music; they're adding a few devices that Cingular resells to their list of supported players. That alone is not a huge win for the subscription services. Their larger problem is convincing people of the value of the model, especially when it precludes using an iPod as your player. Part of the problem with that messaging is the platform, Windows Media, and PlaysForSure, which has acquired a reputation for not being quite such a sure thing. Between momentum and bad press, the Apple triad of iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Store has rolled over the Windows Media and PlaysForSure ecosystem to such an extent that even Microsoft's abandoned it with Zune.

Leaving that aside, does this point to a carrier- and phone-maker threat to Apple's dominance of digital music? After all, Sprint has sold 8 million tracks in the last 12 months, and Nokia plans to put 80 million music-capable phones in customers' hands in the next year.

The mainstream of the portable (if not connected portable, or mobile) music business is Apple. Whether this changes depends on your answer to a few questions:

• Does the world demand a converged device?

• What's the baseline user experience when buying, managing, and listening to music on the go?

• Where should this experience fit into the overall entertainment experience at home?

I see Apple as being able to bide their time as they address the first question (iPhone, anyone?), since they have a clear winning answer to the second issue, and an evolving strategy for the third, which we'll understand better as Apple brings their iTV product to market. In this last area, incidentally, none of the mobile players are credible—the real threats are Cisco, Microsoft, and Sony).

Does this rule out Cingular as Apple's exclusive partner for the upcoming iPhone everyone's expecting? Engadget doesn't seem to think so (or, at least they ain't sayin' yet).

Link

Tags: digital media, music, wireless, iPod, Apple, Cingular, Napster, Yahoo!

Update: I blew the relative introduction dates for the iPod, iTunes for Windows, and the iTunes Store. The original post implied that Apple managed to shift 1MM tracks in five days without benefit of the iPod adding to the demand, which would be amazing and totally wrong. Apple managed their amazing numbers without benefit of iTunes for Windows. That means they were selling exclusively to Mac users. Mea culpa.

Both the San Francisco Bay Area CBS affiliate and the San Jose Mercury News have stories about an explosion that took place at around 7:00 last night at the PayPal offices in San Jose (here's a Google map of their location). 26 employees were reported to be in the building at the time of the explosion, but thankfully, nobody was hurt. The damage seems to have been limited to some plate glass windows.

The report says that a bomb was placed outside the exit of the PayPal section of the eBay/PayPal building, and fire department Captain Jose Guerrero says that the damaged plate glass was pretty thick and that the explosion it had to be pretty strong to do that type of damage. The CBS affiliate's report also states that “some kind of evidence” was found in the debris and makes the eerie statement that “no radioactivity was found”.

Our good thoughts go out to the people who work at eBay and PayPal, who are probably (and justifiably) a little freaked out right now.

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