Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
This week BT announced the launch of BT Vision, their new IPTV service. There are lots of details on RadioandTelly but in summary you get:
A set top box which supports Freeview (UK free to air digital terrestrial TV service)
Set top box incorporates PVR which can hold 80 hours programming
Electronic programming guide which combines 14 day TV schedule [...]
I want to thank the folks at LibraryHouse for putting on a great conference today. The things I liked about it were, in no particular order:
It was buzzy - London feels like a good place to be an entrepreneur right now and events like this are an important part of the mix
Bob Young - [...]
The kernel for this piece was this presentation from Bear Stearns by Spencer Wang on the future of the entertainment industry I found on Raphael’s (Leafar) and Nick Carr’s blogs.
The presentation uses value chains as a framework to analyse TV and chimes well with a lot of what I wrote in Internet TV the end of the world [...]
As you have probably heard we recently led an $11m round in travel oriented social network WAYN.
I wasn’t able to scoop the Sunday Times exclusive with the news so I’m taking the opposite approach and reporting on all the coverage after the dust has settled. Maybe this time next year I’ll have the break on [...]
There are a lot of start-ups in the mobile advertising space. The following list is of European players I could remember or find with a quick search. I’m sure I’ve missed some.
YOC - raised Euro10m on Frankfurt stock exchange - market cap 33m
Admob raised $5m (I believe) from Sequoia and are active in Europe
Screen Tonic raised [...]
I’m joining Fred and Shantanu in reporting that last Thursday night five of the six London based VC bloggers met in Bar Nobu for a few drinks. The full list was:
Paul Fisher of First Capital with his Coffee Shops of Mayfair blog
Fred Destin of Atlas who blogs under his own name
Jason Ball of London Seed Capital [...]
Reading this post on Leafar left me thinking that there is more to say on recommendation than I managed in this post on TV Channels.
The point I missed was this:
Recomendation engines can help you find wonderful new content
In the old world this is quite labour intensive you rely on friends and newspapers, and it is hard to [...]
I owe this little nugget to Reid Hoffman best known as founder of LinkedIn.
He was on the panel at a Silicon Valley comes to Oxford event at Oxford’s Said Business School on Monday night. (As an aside it was a good night and I think events like this one help persuade people to become entrepreneurs, which [...]
This is a second follow up post to Internet TV - the end of the world as we know it. In the original post I argued that the internet might be more disruptive to TV than people realised, in the first follow up post I gave more detail on why IMHO there is no future for [...]
As a VC networking is a large part of what I do, and a couple of things have got me thinking recently.
Firstly this blog has already had a big impact on my network.
Secondly I read Christian Mayaud’s posts on high performance networking - a bit long, but worth reading if networking is core to what you [...]
