Sunday, January 23, 2011

The 20 most popular US Venture Capitalist blogs

According to Compete, here are the 20 most popular US Venture Capitalist blogs:


  1. Paul Graham (@paulg), YCombinator, Essays (97,227)
  2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson), Union Square Ventures, A VC (81,483)
  3. Mark Suster (@msuster), GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (53,655)
  4. Brad Feld (@bradfeld), Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (38,821)
  5. Chris Dixon (@cdixon), Founder Collective, cdixon.org (20,988)
  6. David Skok (@bostonvc), Matrix Partners, For Entrepreneurs (14,173)
  7. Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc), First Round Capital, This is Going to be Big (13,970)
  8. Larry Cheng (@larryvc), Volition Capital, Thinking About Thinking (13,215)
  9. Dave McClure (@davemcclure), Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (11,127)
  10. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), Andreesen Horowitz, Ben’s Blog (10,686)
  11. Jeremy Liew (@jeremysliew), Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (9,344)
  12. Bijan Sabet (@bijan), Spark Capital, Bijan Sabet (8,256)
  13. Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), Polaris Venture Partners, ryanspoon.com (7,828)
  14. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger), Union Square Ventures, Continuations (7,469)
  15. Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage), IA Ventures, Information Arbitrage (7,182)
  16. Rob Go (@robgo), NextView Ventures, robgo.org (6,934)
  17. Josh Kopelman (@joshk), First Round Capital, Redeye VC (6,778)
  18. David Cowan (@davidcowan), Bessemer Venture Partners, Who Has Time For This?(5,993)
  19. Mendelson/Feld (@foundrygroup), Foundry Group, Ask The VC (5,963)
  20. Bill Gurley (@bgurley), Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (5,428)
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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The universe of Twitter apps

Here is a graph from Readwriteweb categorizing 150 Twitter applications :


Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

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The most popular Apple apps

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Friday, January 14, 2011

Does Groupon is worth 15 billion in an 2011 Initial public Offering (IPO)?

There is recent rumour on the Internet that Groupon will try an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which will value the firm around US$ 15 billion in the Spring of 2011.   It is true that Groupon is the fastest Internet firm to reach 1 billion in revenue in 2 years.  Gross and net margin are very high.  Groupon and number 2 LivingSocial have around 92% of web traffic in the group-buying discount market.   Groupon rejected a $6 billion offer from Google last year.

However, there are more than 500 imitators with the same business model targeting national, regional and international markets.  Most of them have even the same web site design as Groupon.  It is very easy to copy the recipe of success of Groupon.  The leader has already the first mover advantages: it became on important players in many cities to create a critical mass.  They have hundreds of salesperson to get new daily discounted group-buying deals.  They enjoy also temporary winning conditions.  For instance, when web advertising started to be implemented with high speed Internet, banner ads and video ads were very lucrative. Now with the proliferation of Internet advertising, these online ads are not so lucrative per click.  When it is new, it is more appealing  for a large segment of consumers.  Another example, is the success of virtual goods sold in online video game.  Who wants to buy a virtual good? I don't understand why am human being would do this, but 6% of the customers of online game did that for $640 million in 2010.  I'm not sure this is a sustainable trend, but it is new and appealing for a segment of the population, so far...

Groupon can create value by personnalizing its offering by getting to know better their customers and using socila networks with mobile networks.  Once you pre-authorize certain categories of ads you are more willing to receive such ads and with location-based services.

Facebook, Google and others can easily get a larger piece of the group-buying daily deals pie.

Does Groupon is worth 15 billion in an 2011 Initial public Offering (IPO)? There is already an Internet bubble and if the firm doesn't diversify its product offering and the way to do it, it may face severe competition.

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Some key Internet statistics of 2010

The number of emails sent on the internet in 2010 (if we delete spam) was around 11.7 trillion.
294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
480 million – New email users since the year before.
262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89 percent are spam).
2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
25 percent – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
Websites
255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.
Domain names
88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
7 percent – The increase in domain names since the year before.
Internet users
1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
14 percent – Increase in internet users since the previous year.
825.1 million – internet users in Asia.
475.1 million – internet users in Europe.
266.2 million – internet users in North America.
204.7 million – internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
110.9 million – internet users in Africa.
63.2 million –internet users in the Middle East.
21.3 million – internet users in Oceania / Australia.
Social media
152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
70 percent – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.
Videos
2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
186 – The number of online videos the average internet user watches in a month (USA).
84 percent – Share of internet users who view videos online (USA).
14 percent – Share of internet users who have uploaded videos online (USA).
2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.
Images
5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Source: VentureBeat
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Create your own Twitter or Facebook daily newspaper



How to read Twitter and Facebook as a daily newspaper

paper.li wants you to organize links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.  It aims to offer a great way to discover content that matters to you - even if you are not connected 24/7.  You can also consult the "personnalized" newspaper of others users.

Aggregating content is not new.  Yahoo through its syndication model does that since its creation by buying information from different news sources and personnalizing the content through My Yahoo where the users select some categories of their choices. However, paper.li is one of the first to offer aggregation of Twitter information and Facebook information.

The quality here resides in the credibility of the person creating the daily newspapers.  Thus, indexing the most  relevant sources on a particular topic can create value to the reader.  For instance, a travel executive can create a personnalized daily newspaper where the content would bring value to its customers.  So far the categories are:


Categories



SmallRivers (paper.li) is a privately held startup incorporated in Switzerland (Lausanne) and located on the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL campus.

Co-founded by Edouard Lambelet and Iskander Pols, the company is focused on facilitating the discovery of relevant content and other people of interest on the web. Paper.li is their latest development, and by far the most promising. Since inception, in less than 6 months, the company got 2 million users.

There is a new word for this type of aggregating tool: it is call "curation".  It is a methodology emerging that companies can use to help gather and sort the information that matters for them. In today world of information overload, corporate CIO's and CMO's are exploring ways to build internal curation solutions.

For more information on that topic you can consult
http://www.businessinsider.com/paper-li-2011-1

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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The 2010 Technology Mashable Awards


The 2010 Technology Mashable Awards were given yesterday.

In some interesting categories there are:

Best Mobile platform: Android

Best Mobile user experience: eBuddy

Best music discovery service: Fizy videomusic

Best new gadget: iPad

Best social media service for Small Businesses:  ReachCast

Best Mobile App: Drivesafe.ly

http://mashable.com/2011/01/10/mashable-awards-winners-infographic/

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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Sunday, January 09, 2011

100 trends to watch in 2011

According to JWT Worldwide here are 100 trends to watch in 2011:


1. 3D Printing
2. Africa’s Middle Class
3. Apps Beyond Mobile
4. Art.sy
5. Auto Apps
6. Automatic Check-Ins
7. Bamboo
8. Banks Branch Out
9. Banner Ads Do More
10.Beer Sommeliers
11.Biomimicry
12.Bjarke Ingels
13.Brazil as E-Leader
14.Breaking the Book  
15.Brigadeiro
16.“Buy One, Give One
Away”
17.CAPTCHA Advertising  
18.Children’s E-Books    
19.Coming Clean with Green
20.Costlier Cotton
21.Culinary Calling Cards
22.Decline of the Cash
Register
23.Deforestation
Awareness
24.Detroit
25.Digital Downtime
26.Digital Etiquette
27.Digital Indoor Maps
28.Digital Interventions
29.East London Tech City
30.E-Book Sharing  
31.Electronic Profiling  
32.Entrepreneurial
Journalism
33.Facebook Alternatives  
34.Fashion Fast-Forward
35.F-Commerce  
36.Food, Ph.D.
37.Gay-Centric Hotels
38.Global Disease,
Refocused
39.Green Luxury Cars
40.Group-Manipulated
Pricing
41.Heirloom Apples
42.Home Energy Monitors
43.Ignorance Is Bliss
44.In the Flesh
45.Jennifer Lawrence
46.London Tourism
47.Long-Form Content
48.Matcha
49.mHealth
50.Michael Jackson Lives
On
51.Micro-Businesses
52.Mobile Blogging
53.Mobile Memes
54.The Nail Polish
Economy
55.Nanobrewers
56.Near Field
Communication
57.The New Mobility
Industry
58.New Nordic Cuisine
59.Next-Generation
Documentarians
60.Neymar
61.NKOTBSB
62.Objectifying Objects
63.Odyssey Trackers
64.Older Workforce
65.The Oprah Winfrey
Network (OWN)
66.Pedro Lourenço
67.Personal Taste Graphs
68.Piers Morgan
69.Pogo
70.P-to-P Car Sharing
71.Rooney Mara
72.Rum
73.Rye Rye
74.Ryo Ishikawa
75.Scanning Everything
76.Self-Powering Devices
77.Smart Lunchrooms
78.Smart-Infrastructure
Investment
79.Smartphone Cameras
Take Over
80.Smoking on the Fringe
81.Social Browsers Go
Mainstream
82.Social Networking
Surveillance
83.Social Objects
84.Space Travel Goes
Private
85.Storied Products
86.Stricter Green Building
Standards
87.Tablets for Tots
88.Tap-to-Pay
89.Tech Liaisons
90.Tech-Enabled
Throwbacks
91.Temporary Tattoos Go
High-End
92.Tintin the Movie
93.Transmedia Producers
94.Tube-Free Toilet Paper
95.Ukraine
96.Urban Industrial Parks
97.Video Calling
98.Virtual Mirrors
99.Voice-Activated Apps
100.YouTube the
Broadcaster

For the report go to http://02a6614.netsolhost.com/production/JWT_100ThingsToWatch2011.pdf

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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The value of blogging

Seth Godin and Tom Peters explain in a short video the value of blogging.

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