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
You will be your first investor. This is not: you should be your first investor, you might be your first investor, it would be nice …
Based on Wednesday’s Hoboken Tech Meetup, it appears that a Hoboken coworking space is moving closer to reality.
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.
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.
And that’s it.
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.
There’s a new data format to master as well.Continue reading
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 …
Casa Mila, Barcelona/Wikimedia
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
One of the corporate blogs I review on occasion is Cisco’s The Platform.
In a post published on Sunday, and in time for the press deluge coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco pre-announced its new “framework” for mobile operators, called MOVE or Monetization, Optimization, and Videoscape Experience.
Run of the mill marketing prose. My attention was instead engaged by a product referred to in some of the MOVE marketing material, Cisco’s ASR 5000 “gateway mutlti-media platform.”
The impressively engineered ASR 5000 could probably stop a Facebook inspired revolution at the speed of a mouse click. And as a propaganda minister, you wouldn’t have to take your country’s Internet off the grid to accomplish this.Continue reading
It can happen. Hoboken Tech Meetup’s Arron Price is trying to arrange a low-cost creative working environment in ‘Boken with a local business person. The …
Thomaseagle/Wikimedia
K Street lawyers, AT&T, state regulators, and rural LECs who have been anxiously awaiting the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on USF and ICC reform will not be disappointed by this massive document.
It makes the Net Neutrality rules read like a Harry Potter novel. Continue reading
Last night at New York Tech Meetup there were clear signs that the local tech ecosystem is growing and evolving.
First, the NYTM organization itself is looking for a managing director to essentially oversee the affairs of the organization—events, outreach, special programs, marketing. The jobs starts at $65k per year (see below).
The second data point was NYTM board member, Evan Korth, announcing that hackNY.org, which he helped co-found, is doubling the size of its summer intern program. Last year, hackNY, placed 12 students in NYC startups, including etsy, 10gen, and others. Note to startups: you have till February 18 to submit an application for interns.
The third data point was that the demos last night were really good.Continue reading
FCC Chairman Genachowski has set a vote tomorrow for a Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation reform.
Some of the ideas Mr. G sketched out in a speech today, in which he called the ICC System “flawed” and “unstable” and the USF “plagued with inefficiencies”, had already been outlined in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.
The most striking proposal in the speech, delivered at The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was a plan to “phase down intercarrier payments.”
As I’ve written about before (see the “Shoot the Laywers” post), the ICC rewards local carriers, mostly rural, with high per minute payments for calls terminated on their switches. These access fees are split with services that have set up intimate talk —read porn—conference bridges in what is referred to as “traffic pumping.”
