Live from Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona: the MNOs are making the point that 17% of major operator traffic in Europe is YouTube (wow!!) and that they’d need to invest EUR70B today to upgrade networks to accomodate social media growth. At which point startups went “well you’re in a terrible business then” and operators went “well we won’t give you access”. And then people just started insulting eachother.
Flickr pic from Dan Appelquist with the panel members’ names.
Mobile is so fun. Especially when the channel friction is so palpable!
Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona this Friday has shaped up to be a fantastic event. Put together by mobile all-round star Rudy De Waele, I am looking forward to some great interactions with a fantastic range of companies, from AdMob to ZYB.
Sounds like Plazes found a good home to build on what was always a very interesting idea. The challenge of mainstream adoption that held the company back may not matter much to Nokia, as the edge informs what we all want to use 3-5 years down the line. And at least Felix is at reboot, which is a good sign!!
Stumped by all the talk around virtualization? It does indeed mean many things to many people. IBM has an overview of methods, architectures and implementations that is a good start into an area still wrestling with its own terminology.
The big private name to watch in this space is Parallels, formerly SWSoft, a Bessemer/Insight investment dating back to 1997. Definitely nearing the “should think about an exit soon-ish” date… current market conditions are pretty hard on successful companies such as this one.
It hit the wires while I was travelling (spoke at INSEAD’s GEF and Seedcamp Berlin) so didn’t get to break the news on Atlas Europe’s new tech deal, NTR Global. I’ve been pushing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) theme ever since joining Atlas in April last year and NTR perfectly fits the mold of what we like in a growth stage deal: a proven, visionary technology platform, fast revenue growth, a world-class management team led by CEO Luis Font, excellent capital efficiency (especially for a SaaS company) and tight execution, a highly skilled sales team, serious market upside in the US with European-based tech… it just all comes together here.
It’s Fred Destin’s newest deal. He is joining the board and is rightly excited about it. The round was led by Max Bleyleben at Kennet, one of Europe’s most savvy expansion stage investors. I spent two days with Max at the company in Barca and that in itself was a great learning experience (after our cheeky our blog comment exchange!).
NTR has a fantastic roadmap about which we’ll be able to speak more in the months ahead. Suffice it to say, if you are doing remote support in SMEs or large corporates, if you need remote login and access facility or if you need to administer a large number of machines across heterogeneous networks, you should give these guys a call. And talk about eating our own dogfood: the Atlas tech support signed up while we hadn’t even completed due diligence… if that isn’t proof enough! :)
Start a free online dating service that doesn’t suck.
Take what Plentyoffish has done, optimize and SEO the heck out of it. Translate into several European languages. Monetize by arbitraging traffic - acquire it free through SEO and WOM, then sell it to the Match and Meetics who are willing to pay up for customer acquisition. Believe me, Facebook and Co aren’t intention-driven enough. You want something that is between an online self-help questionnaire platform (for the girls) and AdultFriendFinder (for the men). With W3C-compliant XHTML/CSS please.
Read Josh Kopelman’s Penny Gap theory. Respect what Markus Frind has built - it’s an amazing achievement but one that can be improved on. Go meet folks like Marc Simoncini of Meetic (whom I haven’t seen since 2003, but who is a true rockstar), or Chris Vollmann, who built iLove (and is currently on a trip around the world following the sale of myvideo.de), or Joe Cohen of ex-Match.com fame (now running the fan-to-fan ticket exchange, Seatwave).
And now for something completely different. Came across this gem, don’t ask me how. I think based on this there’s a general rule of diplomacy which says “whatever you do, BE NICE TO FINLAND”:
I work on the technology investment team at Atlas Venture, a transatlantic venture capital firm. Feel free to email me to discuss your business and its funding requirements.
And here's some photo goodness in case you need to find me in a crowd: I look almost as tired in that as Jim Breyer in his. I must be doing something right :)
The views expressed on this site are my own and in no way represent the opinions of my employer, Atlas Venture. I sincerely hope this blog will not get me fired.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 2007 Max Niederhofer. Unauthorized copying, while often necessary, is never as good as the real thing.
