azeem azhar

Situaton, complication, virtualisation

Claus, my friend at PA Consulting, just launched an office in SL, joining the Reuters presence.
Claus writes:

Second Life also has the potential to be a serious business tool for many of our clients in various industries. It is important for a consulting company to have a view on how to apply technology such as this to businesses. We can now work with clients to build 3D 'immersive' environments that can be used to collect customer feedback, involve customers in design, and eventually use this medium as a customer service and interaction channel.

Igglo closes $12m

I just read that Igglo has closed a $12m round from Benchmark and WPP in Finland.
Igglo has been written about elsewhere but it's a pretty cool model--allowing you to bid on any house in Helsinki even if it isn't listed for sale.
I suppose the next step for them is to cross the chasm (or at least the Baltic) because surely the Finnish market isn't big enough to support that valuation.

Open innovation search engines

Google has launched Google Coop , a service which allows you to roll-your own search engine. (Thanks Om .)

It's a smart idea, allowing  end user communities to create their own slices (or rankings) of the Google index. I would say vertical but in fact this stuff is likely to be as much diagonal, fuzzy or oblong-shaped as it is vertical.

I am experimenting with two Coop engines.

The first is  Trends Potter which is giving better rankings to trend spotting and futurology sites.

The second is Web2.0  which is a desparate attempt to raise venture capital an index of web2.0 related blogs and companies, mostly culled from TechCrunch's list of firms.

Both Coop engines are open to new collaborators. You can just visit and improve the engines by adding more sites as well as adding keyword refinements. Maybe we'll create something useful.

 

Tags: google, search, open+innovation, collaboration

Neutralising kinetic weapons.

The Trophy ADS Forcefield is currently in advanced development

A good description on what until now I would have called science fiction.

How quickly can you get to a billion?

So it's official. Google has bought YouTube for $1.65bn. 

And the question is--how much quicker is it getting to reach $1bn in value to a buyer?

Just looking at private Internet companies, it took Geocities several years before Yahoo acquired it for $1bn or so in 1999. 

Skype was founded in 2002, launched a beta in Aug 2003 and was acquired by Ebay in September 2005, say at three years age for $2.6bn in cash and stock with a $1.5bn earn out. By employees, I think Skype had 200 odd at the time of acquisition.

YouTube was founded in Feb 2005, launched in Sep 2005 and a year later (or so) was acquired by Google for $1.65bn. YouTube's initial investor was Sequioa, $3.5m in November 2005. By employees YouTube had 67 according to press releases.

Without knowing the details, I guess Sequoia is going to make upwards of $400m on the deal (assuming they hold a magical 25%--they may hold much more)--which isn't bad for a year's work. Bonus time in Sand Hill Road!

In other words, it's getting quicker and quicker to get a billion. I heard Danny Rimer say this at an event a few weeks back referring to Skype. It seemed not implausible, but well, a stretch. He was right.

The magical combo of already having an audience online, having eliminated boring operational hassles like how do I scale past a million users, how much will my database licenses cost and so on, means you can test and prove a proposition really quickly. It's something that ordinary firms (pre-Internet) struggle with.

But the deal raises all sorts of other interesting questions:

• Just how innovative is Google's engineering talent? AdSense is powered by Oingo (an acquisition), Google  Earth by Keyhole, Analytics by Urchin (all acquisitions). The same week Google "put a lid on new products", we see an acquisition in favour of organic growth. (Clearly a sensible, non-dogmatic approach for the firm but puts into perspective their ability to regularly generate innovation and take it to market.)
• Upe joked if there were any news companies worth $1.65bn. Well there are but for a $6bn UK firm like ITV or newspaper groups in the US, finding $1.65bn to buy an early stage venture will be a real stretch.

Tags: youtube+google+internet+m&a