The Equity Kicker

Our portfolio company Conversocial has done a fantastic job recently raising their profile on a limited budget. Their marketing strategy has two related strands, firstly assume a position of thought leadership centred around the founder and CEO, Josh March, and secondly generate press coverage by intelligent use of data.

For those of you that [...]

When they released fourth quarter earnings data last week Netflix broke out their streaming and DVD businesses for the first time. A quick analysis of the data reveals that in the US the revenue and profit per month for each streaming customer was $21.94 and $2.40, whilst the average DVD subscriber paid $33.04, which [...]

I awoke this morning feeling strangely down. It was early, but I should have been hyped because I’m off skiing with the ICE crew of European entrepreneurs.

After some soul searching I settled upon the cause of my disquiet: a renewed sense of my own mortality. I’m feeling this way not because it is [...]

2011 was an amazing year for social interest sites. Twitter started growing fast again after an extended flat period, Tumblr finally made it up into the stratosphere and new kid on the block Pinterest had an amazing second half to the year. The Comscore chart below shows traffic growth for all three, as well [...]

Happy New Year everyone!  I blog every day that I work, and this is my first day back in the office. It is good to be back. I’m optimistic that we can all do some good stuff in 2012 – there were a lot of pockets of growth in tech last year and I [...]

If you are like me you have a rough understanding of how Google ranks sites in its search engine results and how those have changed over time.  In the beginning it was all about Page Rank and sites were ranked based on the number of links into the site and the quality of the [...]

Fortieth in a series of weekly posts by myself and Nicholas Lovell of Gamesbrief which answer the fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital.  We expect the series to run for a year after which we will collate the posts into a book.  You can find the rationale behind the series here, [...]

I think the next few years will see a massive increase in the consumer use of technology to monitor ourselves and maintain health and wellness.  We are seeing the first products come to market now, and despite their clunkiness they are getting good use from early adopters.

I’ve been using a service called Dailyburn [...]

Yelp filed it’s S-1 last week in preparation for an IPO next year, and yesterday Rocky Agrawal, wrote on Venturebeat about the company’s strengths and weaknesses as an investment prospect.  Rocky describes himself as a fan of Yelp as a consumer (he was one of the early adopters in 2006 and used to email [...]

You are awash with information.  You have billions of cells, and each one is constantly signalling highly nuanced chemical messages to its neighbours.  Every scrap of tissue has a rich network of nerve connectors and hormonal receptors, and millions of their signals fly around your body all the time.  All the traffic on the [...]