I had a lot of fun listening to Craig Kanarick, the co-founder of Razorfish, the proto-interactive agency, at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup.
I could definitely envision him pitching Fortune 500 companies during the dot-com years and explaining the Web to the “suits”. Did he really do a presentation once-upon-a-time with his hair dyed blue?
No matter. He’s still at it, and yesterday he radiated lots of thought beams on the current digital technology environment. As part of his talk, Kanarick delivered a completely entertaining and spot-on summary of our post-WW II consumer economy—rise of marketing, power of brands, and now the preeminence of real-time on-demand media.
One idea of his that most resonated with me, considering the context of speaking at a tech meetup and having just followed a few demos, is the challenge of being a tech entrepreneur when there is so much open and available IT.
My curiosity got the better of me. While I’m completely content to use turn-key cloud telephony–OnSIP, in my case—the lure of DIY telecom is sometimes too enticing to resist.
This led me to SIPfoundry’s sipXecs, an open-source PBX that many are using instead of an on-premises metal-based solution.
SIPfoundry has grand goals for open VoIP solutions. They are an independent non-profit that hopes to promote “free and unencumbered” telephony. Which is another way of saying their sipXecs PBX software is 100% standards based. So if enough companies, small and large, install sipXecs on their servers, we can all communicate via SIP over the Internet and not pay a dime in per minute charges.
I thought I’d experiment with sipXecs to see what all the shouting was about.Continue reading
With the announcement that AT&T will be ending its all you can eat broadband for DSL and U-Verse customers, I decided to take a look at how US broadband compares with the rest of the world.
And I mean beyond Canada.
I perused data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks broadband metrics, among many other economic indicators, internationally.
The US now joins Iceland, Australia, Turkey, Ireland, and the UK, as a place where major ISPs market monthly pricing plans with overusage charges.
From a global perspective, it appears that AT&T’s plan is (gasp) generous: a ceiling of 150 GB for DSL (250 GB for its fiber-based U-Verse) and $10 per 50 GB of additional usage.
I found them last Friday just off the Garden State Parkway, exit 131-A. The Woodbridge Hilton to be exact.
At the New Jersey Innovates Conference 2011 organized by NJ Entrepreneur, a group of Jersey-centric angels shared their business experiences and their current investing approaches with an audience spread out across the startup curve.
Based on the David S. Rose investment course I completed last month, these private investors fit the angel profile and their advice followed familiar angelic principles but with exceptions—this is Jersey after all.Continue reading
Mission Fifty, the new Hoboken co-working space, is well on the way to opening its door to NJ coworkers.
The principals involved— Michael Pierce, Gregg Dell’Aquila, and HTM’s Aaron Price—already have the space lined up, at 50 Harrison Street. It’s now just a matter of working out the details of what the coworking community is interested in, office-wise
Are you phone- or IM-centric, prefer meetings behind doors or at the nearest cluttered desk? Continue reading
As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone. Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April.
Now some fleeting good news: Over at OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX company, there’s an interesting post about a SIP door that opened over the weekend and then just as mysteriously closed.
For a shining moment, Google Voice numbers had associated with it a SIP address of the form: +1GVnumber@sip.voice.google.com.
In other words, it was possible for a few days to make free calls on any device that supported a SIP stack!
Why colocate? Because your data center is key to your business survival. It’s not just running your internal IT applications, but is central for communications …
New state telecom and cable regulations are not the stuff of compelling headlines. But here in New Jersey, the optimistically named “Market Competition and Consumer Choice Act” , which was recently approved in the Assembly, has actually attracted the attention of our local news outlets.
Also known as A-3766 ( S-2664 for Senate folks), this legislation has managed the neat trick of drawing complaints from both consumer groups and local municipalities.
This latest effort to modify cable franchising rules can be seen as the end-game to a 2006 law that introduced state-wide franchising (aka “The Verizon Act”).Continue reading
My reportage of last night’s New York Tech Meetup is based on listening to the Livestream while I was in the kitchen preparing dinner, but making quick visits between sautes to my MacBook to take a peek.
Yup, another quirky, short Technoverse review of NYTM demos at Skirball.Continue reading
I raise my cup of espresso to the FCC for starting the process to reform the Universal Service Fund with the ultimate goal of modernizing a rusting regulatory structure that is not up to task of universal broadband service.
Reading the beginning of the FCC’s recent Proposed Rule Making on the USF, I was all to ready to discount the glib appraisals of the Service Fund as “inefficient” and “broken”. Sure it’s not perfect, I thought, and of course there are loopy incentives encouraging some inefficient activities, but…
A dispute between XO Communications, “one of the nation’s largest communications service providers”, and the Fund’s administrator, the Universal Service Administration Corporation or USAC, unfortunately seems to validate some of the harsh criticisms hurled at the current USF regime.
It has all the makings of an on-the-edge-of-your-seat FCC caper: battling attorneys, hyper-diligent auditors, endless bureaucratic procedures, ambiguous forms, battling attorneys, and battling attorneys.Continue reading
Hearing angel investor David S. Rose (@davidsrose) speak last night at Hoboken Tech Meetup was the equivalent to speed reading a course in startup financing, marketing, and management in under an hour.
Rose has a lot to say, and he communicates in complete sentences, leading to fully-developed paragraphs with footnotes. In other words, the 100 or so entrepreneurs gathered at Stevens Institute of Technology’s Howe Center absorbed incredibly practical information (with just basic analog voice technology and a few slides).
Rose focused on the finer points of raising private money. He should know. Through his various incarnations—as founder of New York Angels, CEO of AngelSoft, and through his own super angel firm, Rose Tech Ventures—he’s been involved with funding over 80 companies.
David Rose and the essentials of a good pitch.
Did I mention that he also has a reality TV show on the MSN website, called Second Chance, in which he works with entrepreneurs whose first ventures failed, guiding them to startup redemption?
At HTM yesterday, Rose filled in more than a few gaps in my understanding of the startup money race.
Rose started out his career at the receiving end of the financing relationship, founding eight companies, including AirMedia, one of the first wireless data networks, as well as helping to boot up the NYC tech scene.
And then as he put it, he moved over to the dark side, as a private tech investor.
According to an Angel Capital Association survey that Rose presented, most angels, which is really shorthand for individuals with high net worth who invest in private companies (or in SEC terms, “accredited investors”), are much like him: former successful serial entrepreneurs (2.7 ventures ), well educated, older (mid-50s), running at a 100 GHz, and typically investing 10% of their net worth for up to nine years in ten ventures (for a total portfolio of between $100,000 to $1 million) with younger versions of themselves.
Their motivation is profit and fun and contributing to the pool of startup karma.
Though you begin to wonder about what Rose and other angels’ idea of fun is. And there are less hair-raising ways to get a positive return on investment.
It’s not an easy life, and you sense that Rose has heard many, many pitches: I imagine him having listened to every possible permutation of social networking out there.
So what does it take to get funding from Rose or other seraphs?
If a startup decides to seek outside investors—it is possible to bootstrap a company based on, um, selling something and getting revenue or, surprisingly, applying for government grant money—it will have to first pique an angel investor’s wandering interest with a written description of the venture.
While all startups should have a detailed business plan, angels don’t read them since they’re too busy. A shorter executive summary may be glanced at and a one page precis could in theory capture the attention of an angel but something even shorter, say a well-written two-paragraph email, has a better chance 0f gaining an audience with an angel.
If the email or some other method does get you that rare in-person angel meeting, then a tight 30-second pitch that is completely on message about what it is the company does and why you’re the one to do it, may lead—there are no guarantees in any of this—to a formal date.
For that, you’ll need to prepare “the presentation”—i.e., generally slides but other media can be used. As with dating, there are rules to this.
According to Rose, presentations should have in the following order: name and company logo, opening hook (a surprising fact or two), what your company actually does for a living, your management team (why they’re indispensable), a clear overview of the market (as in dollar size), the market pain points (what the startup is trying to solve), the product that relieves the pain (some images of the app, website, or physical product should be inserted), the business model, current or potential customers, marketing strategy, competitive challenges (be honest), barriers to entry (intellectual property or domain expertise or something else that makes this venture unique), and financial projections (sales charts). Additionally, a “pre-money” valuation (see below) can be included but this only makes sense if the startup has a deal in progress with another group of angels who have independently blessed the founders’ estimate of the worth of their business.
On that last point, there are brutal economic facts that determine what investors want for their return on investment. If a typical angel has say 10 investments locked up for a few years, he or she knows that half will fail, a few will return their capital, leaving just one with the burden to bring home the bacon.
If you do the business school calculations (assuming a 25% internal rate of return over 6 years), it mean that the one successful company will have to pay off 20 to 30 times on the initial investment.
On the assumption that a startup convinces two or three investors to fork over a total of $1 million, a startup should have a planned exit valuation of about $30 million for just the investors. The founders and their management will have their own payday of course but that depends on the pre-money worth of the company: in other words, the dollar value of what they brought to the table.
If a startup and these celestial beings can come to terms on an appropriate pre-money valuation—$1 million to $3 million is the range of most of the pre-revenue tech deals these days—then the startup can enter a serious long-term relationship with the angels.
I admit to being more than a little envious of those hackers who made creative use of New York City’s publicly available databases for the BigApps 2.0 competition.
Is there a way that non-programmers can share vicariously in the fun but without taxing limited tech muscles?
Yes. You just have to speak Google.
With their Public Data Explorer and the recently released DSPL formatting language, anyone with modest configuration skills—an area I excel in—can view statistical files in Google’s remarkably well designed graphing and charting app.
After spending a little time learning DSPL straightforward syntax, I decided to explore one NYC agency’s population dataset.Continue reading
The Google Public Data Explorer is a visualization app that brings life to public policy data (or really any statistics you have) through animation.
Google picked up the software when it purchased Trendalyzer in 2007.
You may a remember a popular TED conference video, “Dr. Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes.” Rosling was using Trendalyzer software developed by his non-profit organization, Gapminder, to dramatically display life expectancy improvements as income levels rose.
Last week, Google opened up the Public Data Explorer to accept anyone’s data— until now you could view a few sets of data from various US government agencies and the World Bank.
Yesterday’s Q&A session at the House Communications and Internet Subcommittee felt a little bit mockumentary, a little bit reality TV show with a few movie …
Australian telco rejects femtocell … Intel CEO talks wireless electric lamp … Cisco’s WiFi fail at MWC … Vodafone to avoid closed vertically-integrated systems … Android booth has awesome slide … Euro operators are over-regulated … HTC Desire S runs Gingerbread … Operators have their own app store … Augmented reality navigation app
These are a few of the themes and memes that I picked up while checking out the Mobile World Congress web site and scanning Twitter hashtags. Continue reading
Bantam Live just announced that they had been acquired by Constant Contact, the e-mail marketing company.
We reviewed Bantam Live’s cloud-based social CRM product in October. We thought it was a solid solution for small businesses looking to centralize their Excel-based (and perhaps napkin-based) sales contacts and task lists.
Constant Contact also had positive feelings about the product, paying $15 million for the company (read: its Ruby on Rails platform). Continue reading
Mobile World Congress is happening now in Barcelona. As much as we’d like to buy our paella salads at the La Boqueria before a day on the trade show floor, the editorial team is instead stuck here in NJ.
To help with my remote coverage, which involves monitoring tweets, decrypting media releases, and studying the keynote videos, I decided to take another look at Xydo. It’s the crowd-based recommendation service I wrote about a few months ago. Plus I’ve been informed it’s been re-designed.
As with other sites in this genre, the crowd votes on content, which is pulled in from a number of different sources and categorized into various topic areas.
Topics encompass this whole wide world—pasta and grains, business news, mobile, movies, and on and on
So I entered “mobile world congress” into Xydo’s global search box.Continue reading
As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone. Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April.
I raise my cup of espresso to the FCC for starting the process to reform the Universal Service Fund with the ultimate goal of modernizing a rusting regulatory structure that is not up to task of universal broadband service.
Bantam Live just announced that they had been acquired by Constant Contact, the e-mail marketing company.
Mobile World Congress is happening now in Barcelona. As much as we’d like to buy our paella salads at the La Boqueria before a day on the trade show floor, the editorial team is instead stuck here in NJ.