Jason Ball's TechBytes

Technology & Venture Capital. Early stage venture capital news mixed with personal views and comments

October 16, 2007 • 9:20 pm 0

Symbian Smartphoneshow

I heard from DoCoMo, Vodafone and Nokia this morning (but Sling Media stole the show in the early afternoon).

I wanted to highlight a few key points that jumped out at me:

Smartphones represent LESS than 10% of the market in every western country except Italy

Smartphones are primarily used by males, over 35 earning circa six figures (except Italy).

Smartphone use is going from “snacks” to “utilities” (no mention of Italy)

Wow.

The smartphone show as really packed- and they’re all rushing for sub 10% market? Obviously, this is going to grow and obviously more services are going to become available, but today’s conference has really reinforced how risky it is to be making early stage investments in the mobile application space (unless there’s a solid web tie-in?). You definitely want to be selling the shovels, not digging for the gold…

Some of Tim O’Reilly’s Address Book 2.0 thoughts came out, but on balance, I was pretty disapointed with what I heard… hopefully FOM will be much better.

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Mobile

October 1, 2007 • 10:59 pm 0

Busy Week

The Alarm Clock reported on our follow on investment into Mirriad last week and also picked up my recent post on RSS- highlighting one of our other portfolio companies- Magpie.

Tomorrow, I’ve been asked to join a panel at Mashup Demo. Magpie are demoing their latest version of Brandwatch- hopefully there will be some prospective portfolio companies in the mix as well.

After that, it’s off to the Blognation launch party. Then Wednesday/Thursday it’s the London Edition of FOWA.

And if you don’t have enough on your plate this week, go visit Mahalo’s site. They’re delivering some great content- on everything from Amazon’s MP3 Store debut to Halo 3.

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Search, Venture Capital

August 30, 2007 • 8:42 pm 2

Promoting Europreneurship- what’s next?

San FranBrightoncisco, Silicon Fen (Cambridge), Silicon Glen (Scotland), Silicon Isle (Ireland), Silicon Ditch (London)- whatever you call it, how do we make it better?

Saul has spearheaded seedcamp, we’re running our accelerator program for the 4th time, some universities have speaker programs, corporates are actively supporting start-ups (Microsoft, Oracle, Google) and there’s an ever-growing list of great events to attend (even first tuesday is back)- which is great, but it’s all top-down and by nature available to all of about three companies.

I ran across a few posts from Ireland over the weekend which were good food for thought: Conor’s post on David Heinemeier Hansson, a response over at Pinstripe and further comment at waveson.

Basically, what we seem to need are guys like David to start inspiring others to start writing amazing code- and then we’re really onto something…

What do you think- what’s next and what’s needed?

Filed under: Europreneurship, Events, Conferences and Panels

August 20, 2007 • 8:46 pm 0

Oxford University Entrepreneurship Competition

Just in case you missed my post earlier this year, Oxford are running their 21st Century Entrepreneurship Competition:

The Oxford University 21st Century Challenge Competition is a new and ambitious international entrepreneurship competition being run by the Said Business School, Oxford.We are looking for bold and innovative business ideas that can help to solve the key environmental, health and social challenges of the 21st Century.Entries are now invited into the following challenge tracks:• Tomorrow’s Planet – the environment• Tomorrow’s People – healthcare and medicine• Tomorrow’s Wealth – wealth distributionThe deadline for all submissions is 5pm (GMT), Friday 12th October.Nine short listed finalists (3 from each track) will be invited to pitch their idea to a panel of judges at the Said Business School in Oxford on Thursday 29th November 2007.The overall competition winner will receive the top prize of £35,000 in cash, with three further prizes of £10,000 for the winner of each challenge track.

You don’t have to be an Oxford student to participate. The application deadline is 12th October. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Technology, Venture Capital

July 2, 2007 • 9:40 pm 1

Search, Europe and the essential web [updated]


646438039_936bbb7cf8_3 Last week was really busy, with Library House’s essential web splitting the week in half. The first session was on one of my favorite topics: Search

The lineup of new search/vertical search engines were Quintura, Migoa, extate, trexy, garlik and the todeka project.

I caught up with Douglas of extate (pic on the left) the day before at the Atlas Venture event (thanks Fred!), and he’d let me know they would be announcing funding the following day. Glad to see that extate has raised initial funding- what these guys are trying to achieve is difficult and I wish them lots of luck…

A few key points worth drawing out of the session with the corp dev teams at Google, Yahoo and News Corp are: capital efficiency is king, build to run/profit don’t build to flip plus a few things from their shopping list: geospatial apps, checkout and mobile.

The final point was the pervading theme throughout the event: Europe is hot, and London is hotter.

…and I couldn’t agree more (after all, not living in the US was a conscious decision).

Elsewhere in the World of Search, I’ve been using lijit (now the default search engine on this site), Spock and last (but not least!) Mahalo (adding mahalo to firefox’s search bar is dead easy tutorial here).

[Update]

Library House published their weekly newsletter yesterday which focused on the search companies at the essential web event. Newsletter available here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Search

June 13, 2007 • 8:26 pm 0

On Vox: iTunes Music Festival in London

View Jason Ball’s Blog

Now this is pretty cool. Sixty of the hottest and most respected names in popular music, like Travis, Amy Winehouse, Stereophonics and more, will play gigs at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. The only way to get tickets is to…

» Read more on Vox

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Music

May 30, 2007 • 9:51 pm 0

Oxford Start-up Contest

Oxford University’s Said Business School has announced their 21st Century Challenge Competition offering up to $70,000 to the competition winner:

Applicants will be required to submit a 5-page Executive Summary of their idea by Friday 12th October 2007. The first round judging will take place in October by a
panel of entrepreneurs, academics and other key figures in the field and will reduce
the field to nine finalists (3 from each category).

The final of the competition will be held at the School on Thursday 29th November
2007. The nine finalists will present their applications to a judging panel before an
audience of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, policy makers,
academics and corporate guests.

A first prize of up to £35,000 will be awarded to the competition winner, along with
three runners-up prizes of between £5,000 – £10,000.

Chris Sacca (Head of Special Initiatives, Google) will be speaking at the launch next week as well.

Start your engines!

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Venture Capital

January 26, 2007 • 7:21 pm 3

Where are the Venture Capitalists?

Last night I attended the Young Person networking event hosted by the BVCA (British Venture Capital Association). Lots of young people, but none of them in Venture. Every single person that I spoke to, except Stephen Wilson from Unilever Ventures, was with Private Equity/Buy-out Funds.

I know the BVCA get tired of me complaining about the same thing every time: where are the VCs and why are you not called the BPEA (British Private Equity Association)?

If you’re under 35 and working in VC in the UK, drop me a line at techbytes [at] mac [dot] com and we’ll set up our own networking event.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Venture Capital

December 17, 2006 • 11:24 am 0

New “About” Picture

Jason_ball
I switched out my "About" picture to a caricature that was given to me earlier this week.

I was a judge in the Running the Gauntlet program. As a thank you, they had caricatures of each judge drawn during the 3 day event and have sent all of us a collage of all judges. I thought it was a great "thank you" and decided to replace my mugshot with the caricature.

Thanks again to Matt Pieterse for inviting me to participate…

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Other

December 17, 2006 • 11:24 am 0

New “About” Picture

Jason_ball
I switched out my "About" picture to a caricature that was given to me earlier this week.

I was a judge in the Running the Gauntlet program. As a thank you, they had caricatures of each judge drawn during the 3 day event and have sent all of us a collage of all judges. I thought it was a great "thank you" and decided to replace my mugshot with the caricature.

Thanks again to Matt Pieterse for inviting me to participate…

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Other

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