Roham Gharegozlou's Public Library

So how can you capitalize on this next great tech wave? The same way the winners did last time. Figure out what people want and then deliver it to them using the new version of the Internet—the one delivered via apps. If you’re able to give people a better, faster, more tailored mobile experience, you’ll be one of the disruptors. By precipitating change, you’ll create value. Those that do this best will win. After all, someone is going to create the next Facebook and someone out there is building the next Google. Disruption is in the air, and to me, it looks a lot like 1996 all over again.

So as I look back upon such examples, I try to differentiate between a "niche-to-big-market" opportunity, which doesn't require developing entirely new competencies, technologies, offerings, etc. to make that transition, versus a "bank shot," which does.  Bridgehead and then expansion? Good. Pre-identified necessary pivot? Too complicated.

Black Coral Capital, we have adopted deeper management team evaluation methodologies that get into much more detail on an entrepreneur's prior experiences, successes, failures, lessons learned, demonstrated patterns, etc. And we've learned to look not just at the CEO, but also at others within the senior management team, depending upon the stage and size of the company.

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea," then of course they can go off and make it happen.

 

And the problem with that is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

 

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

 

And it's that process that is the magic.

When it comes to having a data led approach to PR Conversocial is fortunate on two counts, firstly in that the activities of companies and brands on Twitter and Facebook is in the public domain, and secondly in that the press is interested in printing stories about companies engaging in social media. The approach is simple – to analyse the activity of household names on Twitter and Facebook and report the conclusions to the press. They have so far released three reports that have provocative titles and are full of soundbites about household brands. For example the press jumped on data published in Who’s ignoring their customers? A survey of US retailers (registration required) which showed that US food retailer Safeway, which is widely regarded as a very traditional business, is much more responsive on Facebook than Wal-Mart and Kmart.

 

Conversocial had good success with their first two papers, however some publications said they were interested in the stories but didn’t run with them for fear that Conversocial might have biased the results. The research for the third paper was outsourced to a Professor at New York University and got picked up more widely – including in the Financial Times. Coverage in the quality press can be featured in sales and marketing materials and does a lot for the credibility of B2B companies.

 

As a result of all this activity monthly visits to the Conversocial website are up 150% since July

The ‘app economy’ is said to include jobs for programmers, user interface designers, marketers of applications, managers and support staff. The group has also produced a list of the biggest states for app jobs and, unsurprisingly, California takes the top spot with 23.8%. New York follows with 6.9% and Washington, home to Microsoft and many other tech companies, comes in at 6.4%.

The Russian effort has created great scientific excitement about potentially learning some of the long-held secrets of the largest sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, a body of water that wasn’t discovered until the mid-1990s and that is the world’s third-largest lake by volume. 

  But the long effort has also been filled with controversy over some of the chemicals and techniques used in the Russian drilling. Many have been concerned that pristine Lake Vostok — which hasn’t felt the wind for over 20 million years and may well be home to previously unknown life forms — could be contaminated by the kerosene, Freon and other materials being used in the drilling.

Many scientists see Vostok as not only a last frontier on Earth, but also a potential gold mine for learning about possible conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Each is covered in a thick shell of ice but also has liquid water beneath it warmed by either the inner heat of the moon or by tidal forces.  

angels are more prone to support entrepreneurs in their own back yards, with typical funding rounds ranging from $25,000 to $500,000, the report says. At the same time, they're less sensitive to ups and downs in the economy and tend to invest in a "much wider range of innovation" than VC investment firms, the OECD report concludes.

 

In the U.S., angel investors are now putting more cash into biotechnology and health-related ventures, rather than IT, which was an investor magnet for decades, for instance. That's partly due to the rise of angel investing groups over the past decade. By pooling smaller sums together into big funding rounds, these groups are able to spread the risk of betting on promising ventures in less hot sectors.

Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:

 

“If you can’t generate traction, do you really want to raise money?”

 

“If you need money to recruit the best, you’re not ready.”

 

“It’s easier to pitch a new investor than to convert one.”

 

“Capital is mobile, but capitalists are lazy.”

 

Google/organic is search. Direct and feedburner are regular visitors. Everything else (Stumbleupon, Twitter (t.co), Hacker News (news.ycombinator), Techmeme, google/referral, Facebook, and Linkedin are social. So if we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten's traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

 

Google/organic is search. Direct and feedburner are regular visitors. Everything else (Stumbleupon, Twitter (t.co), Hacker News (news.ycombinator), Techmeme, google/referral, Facebook, and Linkedin are social. So if we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten's traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

I believe in integrated products. Thus I endorse Web Second.

 

I think many recent companies make the mistake of not investing enough in web products, if they invest anything at all. I mostly use Twitter on my mobile devices. But there are some things you just can’t do with mobile app. Most notably following many conversations at once the way can do with TweetDeck.