Will Facebook Ever Hit 2 Billion Users?

I just read Jason Hesse’s recent article on the falling stock price of Facebook. It makes some good points and generally I agree with it’s conclusions around the execution of the IPO and possibly today’s valuation. The multiples on revenue were after all, many times that of Google at IPO, for example.

Some of the other conclusions around future growth, I feel hold less water. Jason states:

“More than 900 million people is enormous, but could the company realistically double its monthly users? Anecdotal evidence would suggest not. ” …. “Naturally, the company’s growth could come from new sign ups. Facebook’s largest market is Europe, with more than 230 million users. This means more than one in four people in Europe are signed up to and use the social network. So realistically, there is little scope for this to grow significantly – if you’re not on Facebook already, the chances are you just don’t care and won’t join anytime soon.”

I don’t think I agree with this statement. Why won’t people care any time soon? I consider Facebook and social networking as a part of our lives, to be similar to the take up of email and other new technology, like the web itself. Even my Dad has a profile now, although admittedly for a 75 year old he is pretty well connected with PC’s, tablets and Android phones!

I also can’t help feel the sentiment of this statement is similar to the naysayers of the web 10 yrs ago; I would conclude social networking is following a very similar growth path.

With 1.5+ billion people on the regular internet but with 5 billion mobile subscribers, who are all fast moving to Smartphones with internet, the numbers also don’t support this statement.

And why would more than 1 in 4 people in Europe not want to join Facebook?

It’s taken just two years for Facebook to nearly double it’s user base.

The real issue IMHO is not that Facebook will stop growing because people don’t want to be on a social network and embrace the sweeping social change which those services is causing, but whether Facebook can maintain and evolve a service which captures that growth.

Given that a lot of the growth will be users who access the service by mobile, this is the second issue which faces Facebook (no pun intended). Can a service routed online historically successfully transform it self to become the stalwart of the mobile world?

In summary then the -in my view inevitable- growth of users numbers in Facebook is theirs to screw. They must:

1) Continue to innovate their product and maintain existing users attention
2) Navigate the cultural preferences of the untapped developing markets
3) Become a truly mobile orientated company, with the same level of UI/Ux on mobile as they demonstrate online.

Arguably they are currently failing at no.3

Finally, there is the spectre of “Privacy”. Jason says:

“If anything, as privacy concerns continue to grow, more people will leave the social network.”

I think this is also unlikely UNLESS Facebook makes a very serious faux pas. Radical transparency is not for everyone but there is good evidence to suggest the trend is in that direction. I can’t help feel this argument, that social networking has a limited growth due to privacy fears, is akin to the talk about e-commerce never taking off online for the mass market because of fears of credit cards not being secure online. In other words, it’s a red herring.

Compuserve was my first ever email address back in the mid to late 1990′s. It then slowly died over a period of years, as destination closed wall portals were trumped by the world wide web. Facebook, if it doesn’t continue to aggressively become more open, may risk it’s position as the ultimate social graph and silo of social data. (BTW, that little button in the top bar,  a globe with two striped lines, took you out onto the ‘scary’ WWW)

Facebook must get it’s future strategy right and that strategy must be around becoming more a platform and less a destination site, if it wants to maintain it’s position as the biggest silo of social data on the web. If it doesn’t do this fast enough, it will likely go the way of AOL and Compuserve before it, or be out manoeuvred by a future more open and yet to exist mobile competitor.

Separated at Birth: Robert Di Nero and Eric Van Der Kleij

The fifth in a very intermittent series of dopplegangers. Friends, the famous and more.  This episode features the somewhat beleaguered Tech City CEO Eric Van Der Kleij and his estranged brother, Robert Di Nero.

While Eric’s brother Robert has taken Hollywood by storm, Eric has been helping build Silicon Valley 2 in the heart to London’s East End.

Not everyone has been a supporter of his strategy as the head of the government’s Tech City program, but Eric knows a thing or two about a thing or two, so perhaps he should take a leaf out of his brothers -characters- book and tell people to “..just shut your goddamn pie-hole.”

Separated at Birth:  Eric Van Der Kleij (left) and Rober Di Nero (right)

Would certainly make interviews and start-up meetings a little more intense.

Eric was recently quoted as saying “There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.”  Oh wait, or was that Robert?

More silly separated at birth posts here>

Investors & Entrepreneurs: Breakdowns in Communication

This post was originally published at The Kernel, an excellent deep-dive blog on the start-up scene. Think The Economist for technology.

Not being able to make it to a meeting for lack of cash in your pocket – not enough even for the bus – is a level of financial and emotional trauma that most people in business never experience. Well, good for them.

In the two decades since my first forays into entrepreneurship, aged 14 with an Atari ST fanzine, followed by an ill-fated satirical magazine called TIT (think Viz meets Private Eye), I’ve found myself entirely brassic more than once.

A desire for financial security is not a good character trait in those wanting to be entrepreneurs. Consequently, perhaps, most people have not chosen to create and run a start-up. By “create a start-up” I mean having an idea and starting from scratch, on your own, with no capital.

Most institutional technology investors have never run a start-up. That lack of experience at the coal-face of business is the root cause of many a problem between company founders and their investors. This is my subject this month.

GHOST FUNDS

Financial acumen should surely be a given for venture capitalists, although writing this sentence feels peculiar when tech venture is today one of the worst performing asset classes in Europe. Europe’s venture capital firms are being spurned by their limited partners, and most are unable to raise new funds. Many European firms have disappeared from the market, or are running as ghosts of their former selves.

Looking at the numbers, European IPOs from venture investments yield returns similar to the US, but European trade exits for tech start-ups underperform compared to our transatlantic cousins. The reasons are complex. A 2008 reportattributed the overall performance gap between Europe and North America to a segment of “poorly performing companies”, but this generalisation gives few tangible clues.

The first thing is to recognise that even in the birthplace of venture capital, the United States, all is not perfect if you pull back the curtain. CNN Money summed up the US venture industry last year by saying: “It’s no longer a market of four tiers; it is the rarefied best and then the rest”.

But while early stage investment in Europe for tech start-ups is more plentiful than it ever has been, by most metrics the Old World lags behind the US, in both scale and success. In short, European tech venture performance continues to be a source of embarrassment.

Sadly, I can’t offer you a silver bullet. I’m no expert on the intricacies of the finance and investment industry. But let’s focus on the things that a VC can control. How can we help tip the European tech investment needle in the right direction? Ignoring a founder’s usual bark of wanting fairer deal terms, greater capital deployment and higher valuations, the most obvious target is a greater focus and understanding of what Sequoia calls “human capital”.

Many European tech investors lag behind the best of the US venture community in recognising how valuable a dedicated start-up founder can be, even if that individual might not be the perfect chief executive when a company scales.

This disdain for the entrepreneur can extend to an under-incentivisation of the start-up team as well (though that too can be the fault of the founder). Not many European start-ups have option pools of 20 per cent or over, but that is pretty normal in California.

One UK VC I worked with persuaded all non-execs and employees to sign away the rights to their options at investment, promising to re-instate them from a new pool. Unsurprisingly, none of the options ever re-appeared. Such behaviour is not only unethical, but naive in terms of motivating staff and creating good karma between investors and the senior management team. It does little for your reputation and deal-flow either.

It is true, of course, that the fabled West Coast has plenty of horror stories about “evil” or incompetent investors too, which leaves one counselling first time start-up entrepreneurs to view their new-found VC friends with suspicion from day one. Hardly ideal.

Maybe I’m now the one being naive, but this is not the most expedient way to create the next billion dollar start-up. Let’s face it: it is the few which feed the many in the venture capital model.

One big reason a chasm can form between founders and their investment overlords is practical: like the tragically blinkered army commanders of World War One, VCs often seem to carry arrogance and a sense of entitlement into the board room, consequently making poor strategic decisions, or, equally inappropriately, insisting on bad operational ones. Thankfully it just costs thousands of pounds, instead of thousands of lives.

Too many VCs I meet lack experience and wisdom forged in the trenches of the business battlefield. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of not having enough money for the bus would be an anathema to most venture firm associates, principals or partners.

It is also unrealistic to expect them to understand the pressures entailed in running a tech start-up or being a small business owner. Many VCs have not even run a team or a led a department in their (often all-too-brief) previous careers, let alone convinced a flock of disciples to follow them into the abyss and create something from nothing by starting their own business.

OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE

Worse still, a career in banking, trading, consulting, distress capital or another process-driven corporate environment, with their clear hierarchical ladders and ample support infrastructure, often seems to give the VC misplaced sense of superiority.

“Success” in the financial sector is not to be derided, but the nitty-gritty of having to do everything yourself, on a shoe string, in a team of just two or three, with no money, while trying to persuade often intransigent investors to give you money, is a unique stress which is life-swallowing and not something you can understand from reading about.

And most people from a corporate environment simply don’t get it.

There are exceptions. Some of those exceptions are people I am happy to count as friends and respected acquaintances. These are people who understand, from real-world experience, what it takes to nurture a product or service from birth through difficult puberty to proud maturity – or premature death.

These people are the future of the European venture industry and if you are looking for money, I’d recommend seeking out this rare breed.

But the problems inherent to the European VC-entrepreneur relationship remain threefold. First, VCs often don’t even realise that their understanding of a technology or market is lacking.

Second, the entrepreneur-VC conversation is often at odds when it comes to aspects of managing the business or comprehending operational challenges.

Third, the worth of a founder in a start-up is often underestimated, causing at best ill-feeling and declining motivation, or, at worst, if the founder is removed, a large opportunity cost for the business and ultimately the fund itself.

Most entrepreneurs are pragmatic enough to recognise their failings, and will take on board sensible business suggestions, which are backed up with tangible facts or defensible experience. It is, after all, part of the start-up mantra to iterate, to discover what works. That, by definition, requires an acceptance of failure and the need for improvement.

As we’ve established, the problem is many VCs neither have this experience nor this working philosophy. Yet often they lecture start-ups on what their product should look like, or meddle too deeply in the operations of the business.

EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

A shiny new VC associate once said to me “You entrepreneurs are all so emotional.” It was not meant as a compliment.

You have little choice but to operate somewhat emotionally when you are a start-up entrepreneur. Where would the endless energy to persevere come from otherwise? If you made decisions entirely logically, you would pack up immediately and do something with a greater statistical chance of success.

And this statement suggests not just thinly-disguised contempt, but demonstrates perfectly a lack of empathy and understanding about what it takes to run a start-up company. For this VC, as for many, his is simply a job. A secure, well-paid step upward on the career ladder.

This ignorance is the same reason TV shows like “Back To The Floor” and “Boss Undercover” make such good television: the chief executive often has no comprehension of the day-to-day challenges facing his or her workers, the people who actually make things happen.

Morgan Stanley and McKinsey have the resources and departmental staff to support whatever you need to do to perform your role. In contrast, as a founder, you are the organisation: you are the department for everything.

On the bright side, having left a venture firm to create their own start-up, more than one VC has told me: “I had no idea how incredibly hard this is … it is 100 times harder than I imagined.”

If they ever return to the venture world, those students of experience will, I’m sure, be infinitely more successful than other investors who have no practical grasp of start-up challenges.

An experienced European VC said to me: “I think it is impossible for a venture guy who invests early not to have real operating experience. Even if it’s two years working for someone else’s start-up (most great VCs weren’t phenomenal company builders) you need to know the struggle it is to build something.

“I also think people need to know what it takes to grow something large, it’s a whole set of new lessons in scaling that again you just have to live through. This you can partially pick up from the board perspective but you need real experience to give you good perspective. I think guys in the US get this. Guys in Europe don’t. If you just count up the number of [VC] partners in the US who have operating experience you’ll see it.”

A lack of hands on, real-world experience is the biggest problem facing VCs and tech entrepreneurs, especially in Europe.

VETTING YOUR BACKERS

As an entrepreneur, what can you do? Well choose those VCs who have the hands-on business experience. And get drunk with them before you sign the deal. No, seriously. You’re getting married. You’d never marry a girl or guy you’d not got wasted with, would you?

Find out what makes them tick, what they’ve done in their lives. What have they learned in business? How have they failed? Discuss other start-ups, especially ones which have gone through difficult times. Discuss how they would handle a divorce.

My unnamed European VC says “Venture people are financiers, so we have to think and act like investors, meaning financial capital. But we’re also company builders, which makes a good 50-75% of our job about people … it’s a tough thing to understand if you’re not used to dealing with it.”

Do the following exercise: take the top 20 firms in the US. Look at the partners’ bios. Look at how many:

• started a company
• worked at a start-up
• were execs of a start-up (VP or higher)
• sold or took a start-up public
• worked at a tech co
• were execs of a tech co (VP or higher)
• hold engineering degrees
• have MBAs
• worked in banking
• worked in consulting

Then repeat that process with the top seven firms in Europe. The whole exercise should take you less than an hour. The resulting disparity is shocking.

If you are limited partner, you can help the European tech ecosystem (and your own return), you should only give your money to a fund if the team is entrepreneur-heavy.

Because, unlike regular businesses, start-ups are defined by a set of unknowns. They are not straightforward enterprises. It is usually a messy, pivoting, imperfect machine, run by one or more impassioned individuals who have sacrificed a regular life for the promised land of thenextbigthing.com.

But there could be a significant improvement for the success rate of European tech funds, and the start-ups they invest in, if venture firms simply hired more people with real, tangible hands-on experience, rather than the the cookie-cutter, MBA-toting ex-finance guys they favour.

Just look at career politicians for another example of what happens when people make decisions about things they have no real-world experience of.

Apple and iOS will not become a smartphone monopoly

I just read this article on Techcrunch about why -allegedly- iOS will dominate the burgeoning smartphone O/S market.

It won’t.

As I said in the comments, I can’t agree with this analysis of the market.

Even from an instinctive point of view, without referring to the market numbers, it is highly unlikely that a high end desirable brand like Apple will become the dominant player in the mobile space. I’m unconvinced they even want to.

Apple will continue to have a disproportionate impact on the direction of the market and likely remain the fanboy and girl object of desire and admiration for the foreseeable future, but do not mix this up with the realities of the wider market.

In addition, Apple remains a more desirable piece of kit for laptops and desktop use with PC’s, but has never been dominant – the arguably inferior Windows O/S has.

Once you do look at the numbers, the likelihood of Apple and it’s iPhone O/S taking an equivalent position to Windows monopoly on desktop, seems even less realistic. Firstly most of the growth in mobile subscribers over the next 3 years will be in developing countries. Second, the bulk of the upgrades from feature to smartphone of western users, will now come from the un-tech savvy. They will believe what the shop sales person says, or just pick the brand of phone they are used to and had before. iPhones will even be out of the reach cost-wise of many Western users, on lower incomes.

Apple is vastly profitable, it does not need to own the entire market and were it to try to it would likely not be the most profitable of operations that it is.

In addition, open ecosystems are more likely to dominate and the Android O/S is free to install. This is without even discussing RIM’s new O/S, or Samsungs Bada (Samsung is the worlds biggest manufacturer of phones).

With only 30-40% of the US and UK population having a smartphone, there is a huge amount of growth to come – but with 3-4 times the number of phone subscribers due to have smartphones, than there are current internet users globally, it is extremely improbable that the phone O/S war will even be just a two horse race, in the next 3 years, or even 5, IMHO.

More reading? I wrote about Android versus Apple some time ago here:

• Jan 2011 – Why Android Will Win
• Dec 2009 – Paranoid iPhone

My Failed Virgin Atlantic Cocktail Competition Entry

Some months ago Virgin Atlantic had a competition to find a suitable cocktail recipe to use at the opening of their shiny new Virgin Atlantic clubhouse at JFK in New York. Always eager to get creative I came up with the original cocktail below, which included what I thought was an awfully clever hat-tip to their two new routes for 2012.

Virgin's swanky new $7m club house at JFK. Image courtesy http://www.modern-traveler.com/

Sadly, the competition judges clearer didn’t agree that it was anywhere near as clever as I thought it was, thus my “Virgin-Sunrise” is doomed never to become a famed addition to the New York scene. Nor did it win me return tickets for two to New York.

Gutted.

However, rather than this concoction go to waste, I thought I’d share it with the 1.5 million internet users and rather lesser number of blog readers. Let me know what you think!

(Competition entry copy pasted below for good measure – pun entirely intended!)

Virgin Sunrise-Jack

Ingredients: Orange juice (or blood-red orange juice), grenadine and Yukon Jack.

In honour of Virgin Atlantics two newest routes to Cancun Mexico and Vancouver Canada for 2012, this creation is a hat-tip to the famous Tequila Sunrise cocktail invented in the 1930’s (Mexican Tequila, orange juice, grenadine) and Yukon Jack, the “Black sheep of Canadian Liquors” (a whiskey-based liqueur with citrus overtones brewed with honey).

The “sunrise” is for the way it looks after it has been poured into a glass, with the denser ingredients (cassis or grenadine) settling, creating gradients in colour.  Yukon Jack is said to be born of “..hoary nights, when lonely men struggled to keep their fires lit and cabins warm” it is boldly flavourful yet surprisingly smooth, just like New York itself – the city that never sleeps.

How Social Media is Changing Customer Service

After my little experiment in social media and customer service back in May 2010, I thought I’d follow up with this fantastic infographic on the topic (below) showing how brands which don’t embrace the new communication mediums are going to be losing customers and damaging their market presence in the future.

There are some great start-ups in this space, helping companies do a better job of managing their presence – not least Conversocial, run by my good buddy @joshuamarch

My Prediction for the Future of Nokia

Maybe I’m missing something (I’ll admit I’m not as well versed as I sometimes have been on the machinations of mobile industry juggernauts) but I can’t help feel this cartoon (which I spotted yesterday and felt obliged to graffiti) is the most likely destiny for Nokia:

..and yes in spite of the pretty excellent Lumia.

Will Nokia’s enormous existing user base and continued growth in developing regions be enough to prevent eventual sublimation into Bill Gates Jurassic beast?

I’d argue that the natural conclusion of the Microsoft pact makes the future purchase vital for Microsoft. Some Nokia loyalists may be hearing echo’s from Star Wars popular culture: in the words of Lando Calrissian “This deal is getting worse all the time”.

Discuss.

Entrepreneurship: Timing Is Everything

First published in The Kernel last December, I share my biggest lesson so far: that in business, timing is everything.

No, none of these people are me.

Published article here: http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/column/196/timing-is-everything/  copy below.

 

One of the most famous British philosophers of our age said, “to realise the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom.”

Clearly, Bertrand Russell had never started his own business, let alone a tech start-up. Russell died a full twenty years before the invention of the web, so we’ll forgive this infelicity – but while his protestation may be helpful as a bon mot about sagacity and wisdom, time is an all-too-often overlooked variable when it comes to starting a business, particularly in the technology industry.

Take a stroll through the graveyard of good ideas, and there are plenty of high profile disappointments to muse over. I’ve had my fair share, with too-early-to-market failures featuring particularly strongly. They were smaller and less glamorous than those of popular culture, but when you have, metaphorically, given birth to a child it is painful to lose it, whether it’s made the cover ofVogue or not.

My first was Cambridge Virtual City, a localised web portal. In the late 1990s, I registered CambridgeVirtualCity.co.uk – and 150 more around the UK – with visions of a network of websites where you could work with local businesses, find information and more. But selling web advertising to businesses back then was not straightforward. “So you want us to advertise, locally, on the Internet. But isn’t the internet global?” Queue long pause. “Well, we don’t really understand the point, but you seem like a nice chap so you can build us a company website if you like?”

My failure to secure sufficient advertising revenue was as much to do with my inconsistent sales strategy and undue focus on product development as it was market timing, but the sales cycle was certainly bogged down by an education process for potential customers – something which, as a one-man enterprise, I didn’t have sufficient resources to get caught up in.

Being first to market, I learned, is rarely best. Thankfully, the virtual cities idea pivoted into a successful website development business, which I sold in 2001. I was undeterred by my experience launching products way too early. You might say it was to become my calling card. (All the more ironic for someone who at school once received a prize for being the most consistently late student, ever.)

Playtxt was my fourth start-up. It was a mobile location-based social network. Literally dreamed up in a pub, The Fort St George on Midsummer Common in Cambridge, it was pretty cool for its time. Text in your location by SMS and Playtxt would text back telling you where your friends were. You could message other people, share your location and share photos. Again, however, it was an anachronism. This was 2002, and we were unable to convince any of the infamous Cambridge Angels it was worthy of investment. “I just don’t believe any one is ever going to use a mobile phone for that sort of thing!” one of them told us.

And so we stumbled onward, hand to mouth, until 2004, when, from across the Pond, Dodgeball appeared. The first child of Dennis Crowley, better known now for Foursquare, Dodgeball had a New York swagger the American press eagerly lapped up. A new acronym was born, and I discovered that I was running a “MoSoSo” company, standing for Mobile Social Software. In fact, it was LoMoSoSo, Location-based Mobile Social Software. Thankfully, this awful abbreviation expired about the same time as both Playtxt and Dodgeball, shortly after 2005. Dodgeball was bought by Google. Playtxt was not.

* * *

Inside Google, Dodgeball starved and died. The lesson from this experience, alongside a growing suspicion that doing direct-to-consumer technology innovation in Europe was for martyrs, was that both services were way too early to market.

Ten years on, developing services for smartphones is still a painful, pricey experience and there is still no critical mass of people using location services for social interaction.

In fact, developing for today’s smartphones is like the first dot com days, only instead of different, incompatible web browsers, we have different, incompatible mobiles.

If you have made it this far, then most of your friends probably do have a smartphone, but – and this may come as a shock – most normal people still do not: smartphone penetration in the UK and North America is around 35 per cent of the population, depending on whose statistics you believe. When Facebook started in 2004, internet access was at 55 per cent of the US population. By the time they opened up the service beyond college students in 2008, over 84 per cent of the US population had internet access.

MySpace, Friendster and, before them, Black Planet, had tried to create lasting online social networks. Timing is not the only thing that killed them – Friendster, for example, had repeated scaling and engineering issues – but timing was certainly a big factor.

In 2002, I spent half my time at Playtxt explaining to friends, investors and potential users what the hell a “social network” even was. We were, of course, using the wrong words: the curse of knowledge had struck, and we failed to communicate our ideas in sufficiently simple or compelling language.

Luckily, there is now plenty of research into poor timing and better communication.

A great starting point when doing anything innovative is grasping Geoffrey Moore’s chasm; or rather, learning to leap over it. He splits your initial target market into enthusiasts and visionaries, after which the chasm needs to be jumped to reach early adopters, pragmatists, the conservative majority and finally the laggards. Many products or services never make it over the chasm, because they are simply much too early: the market is not ready for them, or a pre-requisite technology is not sufficiently widespread.

Even if you argue that – for example – a 35 per cent penetration of smartphones is a big enough target market, the public consciousness has to change to adapt to using these relatively new devices.

One recent report said that many people have yet to install a single app on their smartphone. My mother certainly hasn’t, and she is on her second Android handset. Market surveys, analysis, reports and research all help, but as is so often the case with something new, people do not even know what they want. Instead, you have to take base indicators – can people access my service? Does it solve a problem which exists today? – and find a way to test your assumptions as rapidly as possible. The hard part is being honest with yourself about the results.

Simple tests are often the best. When it comes to your message to the market, if you cannot explain what you do in one sentence in a way your mother understands, keep trying until you can. Then, using that same description, if you cannot find at least a handful of people you know who are desperate to use your product or service after hearing about it, that may be a warning that you are too early to market, you are in the wrong market, or even that your idea is just plain terrible.

Eric Ries’ recent book The Lean Startup has rightly been championed as a crash course in fail fast methodology. It is highly recommended reading.

In order to pre-test your idea, he suggests finding the fastest, dirtiest ways to do so. For example, you can set up fake websites, drive some traffic and see what converts, before you write a single line of code for a “real” product. Starting simple is the cornerstone of Ries’ book and it should be the cornerstone of your start-up. Build something simple and test it. This may be the only way to know for certain if you are too early to market or not. Rapid iteration is essential if you are not going to die in the process of trying to find out.

Messaging, especially in a premature market or with an innovative product, is so critical it can make or break you – fast. When changing the headline wording on the Playtxt homepage, we found sign-up conversions changing by over 40 per cent in both directions. Exhaustive trial and error was the only way to find out what worked; had we done this before building the product, maybe our product would have been different.

Eventually, with Playtxt, we did find a message that worked and we had a product people wanted to use, having meanwhile built too much. Suddenly, sign-ups leapt to 1,400 a day, and with my credit cards maxed out, we ran out of money and had to switch off the service. (1,400 sign-ups a day does not sound like a vast number, but we had to pay for receiving the inbound texts and the SMSs back out to people’s phones.)

* * *

Mark Zuckerberg is smart. I joked with him once that I had educated the market for him by trying to sell the abstract concept of a “social network” and “social software” years before Facebook with Playtxt. In reality, I simply was not shrewd enough to target a homogenous group who all have the same vested interest – 10,000 hormonal Harvard students – and solve a specific problem for people. His original site, “The Face Book”, really sold sex: not the act, but the desire and promise. Who wouldn’t want to check out the other 9,999 students at their university?

* * *

So far, all my start-ups have been based in Europe. But I don’t think geography makes that much difference, insofar as if you are focused on a specific geography, you need to cater for the development stage of your demographic in that territory. The fabled Bay Area has an extremely high percentage of enthusiasts, visionaries and early adopters. In this regard, getting new and innovative services off the ground can be easier. Arguably, it gives the new kid on the block time to prove himself and learn the ways of the world, before leaving home to go and get a real job the other side of Moore’s chasm.

As for me, I’m considering what field my own next start-up should be. I hope I regress to my school days and, if anything, be late this time, not early.

Predictions for the World from 2002.. many have come true

An interesting set of predictions, from 2002…

What RIM Must Do With Blackberry To Survive & Prosper

Anyone with even a passing interest in the mobile industry is aware that RIM has been struggling. From accusations of being an irresponsible conduit for enabling the London riots to flourish* to it’s CEO losing the plot while being interviewed, to it’s ever diminishing market share and reports of delayed handsets, RIM is in trouble.

A phone store smashed in London during the riots. Taken from the Guardian's article - click to read.

(* a ridiculous idea btw, if it wasn’t BBM it would be something else)

Unlike many though, my view of RIM and moreover Blackberry, is not as negative.

If RIM had the right leadership (and perhaps embraced just x1 CEO rather than x2 ?!), it could take this opportunity in turbulent times to change, evolve and grow.

The problem is that, in the same way Microsoft missed the boat with the web and lost the search market (through Bill Gates uninformed leadership at the time) the same way Nokia has (still in my view) not changed radically enough as a business to yet flourish, RIM is not making the gut-wrenchingly tough and transformational decisions it needs to, to fight in this new game, on a new playing field, which has some new rules.

Blackberry/RIM could still recover. They just need a radical strategy and of course one which works.

In short they need to focus on their strengths and get someone capable to sort out their product roadmap and new O/S.

Blackberry's heritage is in efficient, keyboard driven long battery life devices many of which are often used abroad

Three things have kept me using a Blackberry and it is these top three things which RIM should focus on in the short term:

3) Battery life. Traditionally I am used to still having a working phone long after my friends batteries have died a death. They must focus and innovate on maintaining this lead in the battery-life stakes – as there is a big contingent of people out there who dont want to have to charge their phone twice in one day a la Apple iPhone.

Battery technology will eventually improve, but meanwhile, this is a key differentiator.

2) The keyboard. I hate touch screens for typing. The keyboard on the new Blackberry 9000 Bold is possibly their best ever.

They must find ever more innovative ways to integrate this keyboard into devices which will tempt users from switching to touch screen only.

1)  Bundled foreign data ..and this is the most disruptive. This is something no one is fixing soon because its a Golden Goose for the MNO’s.

I do have unlimited bundled international data on my Blackberry. It’s a tarriff I got with the UK’s O2 3 years ago. Sadly, they no longer seem to do this tarriff (which means I have to ignore my VIP upgrade rights and buy my own new handsets).

Why did O2 do this? Why did they stop?

I don’t have answers to the second question, only the first.

My understanding is that the RIM network (which was originally built for international email and push messaging, long before most mobile users even knew what a “data plan” was) is used with data routing (after hitting the cell tower) via Blackberry’s own international network of servers and APN’s (those more technical than me, can probably confirm this as right or wrong).

Assuming this analysis is not entirely wrong, RIM could force a deal with carriers to provide bundled international data on ALL their handsets. This would steal a march against all the other phone providers who don’t benefit from RIMs existing data infrastructure.

Bonus number 4) Run Android Apps. I understood the new version of the O/S should be able to run Android Apps. If it can, this should without question be included as standard, especially giving Blackberrys existing rather woeful collection of applications.

Other than finding a leadership team who can implement these things, at least to recover RIM in the next 12 months, to me these seem awfully simple things to be focusing on.

So many people travel these days, the data plan is the scourge of the traveller. What clearer message to market than “Buy a Blackberry: Get international bundled data. No more data charges”. Add in a fair-use policy and watch your sales rise.