Data are plural!
Ok – short post on a real pet peeve of mine. The word “data” is plural. See the following examples: Incorrect: Them data is cool! Correct: Them data are cool! It’s a minor annoyance and, coming from someone who can’t figure out when to use affect vs. effect, perhaps you should just ignore me . . . but really – data are plural.
February 25, 2005· 1 min read
NewsGator and VNU
Ok – I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I promised NewsGator that I wouldn’t forget to drop a post on their recently announced deal with VNU (see the press release here; Brad has a post on the announcement as well – view it here). The two companies are going to co-brand an RSS aggregator for 7 European markets(VNU is a big tech publishing house in Europe). It’s a great deal for both companies and an important step forward for NewsGator in their continued development. …
February 25, 2005· 1 min read
Conveying Information Effectively
Here’s an interesting experiment to try. Get a friend. Think of a song (one that you would reasonably expect your friend to know as well). Tap along with your finger while you play the song to yourself in your head. Now ask your friend what song you were taping out. It turns out that the taper’s estimate of how easy it will be for someone to guess what song they are tapping is vastly greater than the success their friend will have in actually coming up with the correct song. The taper believes they are conveying much more information than they really are. (Apologies for not being able to find the actual study reference I was looking for – I couldn’t find it on Google Scholar and I’ve long since thrown out the psychology textbook I had that referenced the study.) …
February 22, 2005· 2 min read
A small step?
This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven’t been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .). …
February 17, 2005· 2 min read
What it takes to go public
I’ve sat through a few presentations by investment bankers recently on what it takes to go public (most recently at VC in the Rockies – see my post about the conference here). I thought I’d throw out some of my notes so you could see what I’m being told it takes to get public in the current market. The VCIR panel I sat through included some thoughts on the state of the m&a market, so I’ll include those notes as well. Company ‘Requirements’: – Revenue: ‘Bigger the better’; minimum of $60m/year annualized (so $15m/quarter at the time of the IPO; however 60% of 04’ IPO’s were < $100m in revenue (up from only 30% in the depths of the market); this has been a very consistent metric across all of the bankers I’ve talked with. – Profitability: Companies should be at or near profitability prior to IPO; there was some debate across the people I talked with about whether this was a requirement – some people thought companies absolutely needed to be profitable, others gave a little bit (but not much) of wiggle room. – Funding Needs: Company needs to be fully funded – the money raised in the IPO should be expansion capital, not core operating (get to profitability) capital- Team/Execution: Company probably needs to have been around for 4+ years; management teams are coming under much closer scrutiny by investors (was not the case in the bubble) …
February 17, 2005· 3 min read
Who vs. Where
I recently wrote a blog – The Power of Location – about Quova (one of the companies I work with) and the idea of “place” on the Internet. In response, Dimitar Vesselinov (who has a great blog) dropped a couple of comments to the post. My sense is that not everyone pays attention to the comments section of blogs, so I thought I’d post the links he suggests here. I also want to be sure I’m clear on the differences between digital identity (the subject of Dimitar’s comments) and geolocation (the subject of my post) as well as how the two ideas overlap. …
February 16, 2005· 3 min read
Steppin’ Up
I took an important step in my life as a venture capitalist today when I attended my first board meeting as an actual board member (rather than a board observer – see my post on this distinction from last month). While the earth didn’t exactly shake off its axis, I can’t help but feel that today was a real milestone in my life as a venture capitalist. I’ve worked with a lot of companies since joining Mobius, but this is the first deal that is really my ultimate responsibility. Today’s board meeting wasn’t unlike the hundreds of other board meetings I’ve participated in over the past 3 years, but there was no question that there was something a little different about it for me. I don’t want to make more out of this than there really is – I work very closely with all of the companies I’m involved in at Mobius and am for the most part treated by all of them as if I were on the board. Still, there was something different about my meeting today – maybe just in knowing that Mobius (and our investors) need look no further than me when judging this investment . . .
February 15, 2005· 1 min read
Venture Capital in the Rockies
I spent the much of last week attending the annual venture conference sponsored by the Colorado Venture Capital Association. The purpose of the event is to attract out of state VCs to take a look at Colorado venture deals that are in the market (click here for a link to the companies that presented this year). I’ll talk about Colorado’s venture capital market in a separate post, but suffice it to say, it’s important to the local VC community to have financial support (at least on some deals) broader than the local community can provide. While each of us has relationships with firms out of state that we syndicate deals with, as a group this is our one annual chance to put our best foot forward to out of state investors. …
February 14, 2005· 5 min read
The Masses Speak
A couple of days ago the following story hit my inbox from Marketwatch (story below, link here): WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — While you watch the Super Bowl, dozens of online-savvy consumers and Web loggers will be watching the Net to see how the game’s TV commercials are playing in Peoria. Intelliseek Inc. of Cincinnati and New Media Strategies of Arlington, Va., have lined up dozens of people to surf Web sites, blogs and message boards to get a fast read on the effectiveness and popularity of marketers’ commercials. With TV costing as much as $2. million for a 30-second spot, companies want to know whether their money was spent wisely. …
February 8, 2005· 4 min read
The Power of Location
The Mobius web-site was spoofed recently. Someone – presumably looking to pass themselves off as a legitimate venture capitalist and needing a web-site to do so – copied our site and changed the name of the firm as well as some of the biographical information (contacts, team, etc). They even went so far as to pull live feeds from our site that updated our portfolio ticker. We looked up information on the domain on whois and on some of the registry sites, but the most interesting data came from one of our portfolio companies – Quova. Quova has mapped the IP space of the internet for physical location. If you give them an IP address, they can tell you where it is located (the data are extremely accurate to the country level; very accurate to the city level and beyond). They can also tell you some useful things about the address (connection type; carrier; proxy info; device; etc). We’ve been investors in Quova for several years and I’ve worked with the company pretty closely since I joined Mobius. In this time I’ve had the chance to talk with some of the company’s customers (who use the data for things like fraud detection and localized marketing), sat through demos of the company’s service, talked with their technical team, etc. I’ve never really had the chance to use the service . . . until now. I was amazed with the data they were able to come up with and it was very helpful to our IT group who was trying to gather more information about the site in question. The Internet is often described as a place without borders. In reality that’s not correct. Technology exists that gives us the ability to define these borders. Technology also gives us the opportunity to take some of the anonymity away from the Internet and to create boundaries around our on-line lives. There is such a thing as ‘there’ on the internet (as opposed to ‘anywhere’) and I think we’ll see an increasing use of this technology to make each of our experiences on the Internet both safer and more relevant (just the past year has seen the ability to localize searches; more geographically targeted banner adds; etc. – often powered by Quova’s technology) and more profitable (routing traffic that was previously unserviceable, for instance, to a partner site who can service the traffic, etc.). Think of the Internet as comprising both a virtual ‘there’ and a physical ‘there’ that combine to create our experience (and may separately be relevant to enhancing that experience). It’s not hard to come up with the ways that the combination of these data will quickly change our on-line experiences.
February 3, 2005· 3 min read