Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
I try not to plug Esprit or our portfolio too much on here but today I’ve cracked under pressure from my colleagues. We had five companies in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 - out last Sunday.
They were:
Axiom Systems OSS Software
Road Angel Vendor of “Road Safety Devices”
Fluency speech recognition aps
Packet Exchange global IP networking service
Lagan public sector CRM software
Well done to Affiliate [...]
I am a big believer in cementing your online brand with offline activity and have posted previously on meetings as a way of doing this.
So MySpace TV and Bebo TV are good ideas. But reading about MySpace TV on mashable I’m thinking it might not be so good in practice. You can read the details on Pete’s [...]
Back in August MySpace started talking big about taking on YouTube - as I commented here.
Well now they have got ahead. And by some way - 20% more streams in the period. Yahoo! is also bigger than YT and about the same size as MySpace. All the data is US.
I first saw it in the [...]
Click fraud just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Despite Google’s $90m settlement and Yahoo!’s uncapped but similar settlement both of earlier this year the issue continues to rumble on. The Oct 2 issue of BusinessWeek leads with it and there is a lot of commentary in the blogosphere - e.g. Esther Dyson here and. Eric Frenchman here [...]
Fred at A VC and Val at alarm:clock both posted on the recent Venturesource data which shows that in H106 $262m was invested in 49 web2.0 companies in the US.
Their perspectives differed - Val felt it wasn’t much out of a total of $13bn. Fred was ambivalent - web2.0 is a hot space after all. My [...]
An article in the FT this morning “Ads send wrong message, says survey” (most of it hidden behind a DRM wall) cites a survey which found that ”nearly one quarter” of baby boomers were insulted/put off buying certain brands by their advertising.
The article makes more of this than is warranted - advertisers don’t expect high hit rates, think direct mail [...]
Regular readers will know I have been skeptical about how much social networks are worth - keen readers will have noted I have been getting less skeptical over time. The $900m Google-Myspace deal was a pointer I couldn’t ignore.
Now I’m going to concede on this entirely. You gotta go with traffic. Once you have (a [...]
I always remember a piece of advice given to me at an introductory presentation to my first job as a management consultant at Gemini Consulting. The partner was asked how new recruits should play the politics of the firm and after a little preamble he said “just do good work and the rest will take [...]
Using software to analyse the content of pages and then serve ads based on the results does two things for you:
Allows targeting of ads based on the content of the page - e.g. read that a blog is about cars and serve a car ad, or getting more sophisticated read that it is about football [...]
It is a bit early to reach this conclusion, but Yahoo! issued a profits warning yesterday blaming a slowdown in online advertising. Their shares lost 11% and Google and Ebay also suffered. Details here.
This sends out a warning signal to me.
A lot of what I read about these days and have posted about on this [...]
