Venture Capital Goes Super-Size to Outsize Competition
Is super-sizing your funds a way to create venture runway to steer past or through the downturn and stay competitive in the global market? Many startups – like Mahalo, Ning and LinkedIn – pride themselves on raising enough funding to survive the nuclear winter of late 2008 and basically all of 2009. Facebook decided to add runway and incent its employees through a follow-on $100 million passive investment from DST, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies group, who also put $180 million into Zynga in December.
Last Tuesday, Intel Capital and 24 VC firms set to put $3.5 billion over two years into US startups to bump up America’s competitive edge. Intel Capital is earmarking $200 million individually.
Via the NYT: in a program called the Invest in America Alliance, Cisco, Intel, Google and Microsoft, among other big tech employers, are hiring 10,500 US college tech grads to regain international ground lost. Per Intel’s Paul Otellini:
Unfortunately, long-term investments in education, research, digital technology and human capital have been steadily declining in the U.S. So, too, has the commitment to policies that made us such an entrepreneurial powerhouse for more than a century.
As many VCs raise more to create investment mines in nascent countries such as India and China, the market seems to be correcting in trending tides: first startups who squirreled away cash, Angel capital/investment groups who are finding High Wealth Individuals (HWIs) looking for early discounts, tech companies seeing their international talent and US competitive edges decreasing, and now VCs who see value in creating big funds. Read more >>
Google Checkmate on Apple and iPad Hype: Buy Adobe
With the new Apple iPad receiving an iHype or iYawn from the tech and media communities, a former colleague and Applephile, Patrick Kearney, suggested that Apple was crazy not to just acquire Adobe and own/integrate Flash. I counterpointed via the socialnet, that Adobe would be more integral to Google’s apps and offer a serious checkmate on Steve Jobs’ ability to close out his Apple hardware and software ecosystem.
The Google Value in Owning Adobe:
- Keeps Google intrinsic to Apple, especially if Bing replaces Google Search across Safari, iPhone, iPad browsers and devices.
- Adobe owns Omniture, an online marketing, data mining and analytics company, which it picked up in September 2009. Like Google’s acquisition of Urchin which became an invite-only Google Analytics and is now free for anyone. Omniture could be the premium or pro solution for big brands that need the stepabove solution, and of course crave CRM. It’s more behavioral, offers paid SEO across all search platforms, so it fits accretively.
- Launch Google lite version of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (and…?) for its Google Apps. Many people are moving over to Gimp, an open source Photoshop design app, from outdated versions of Adobe’s Photoshop. This would democratize the products, while still offering premium versions that require a monthly subscription to remove the contextual ads and continue to innovate the product features for power-users before they go mainstream and free. Think of it as R&D for the premium, paying crowd who want the full version, and then as features become common, they go to the open, Google app public. This model of lite versus full versions is working well for the Apple Apps Store, and could move to an online subscription model to avoid distribution fulfillment and other retail packaging costs.
- Ownership of Flash enhances YouTube’s dominance in online video. Pretty clear, Google labs up Flash internally and figures out ways to make it pay out more for its slowly monetizing video flagship. YouTube’s choice advertisers get premium Flash benefits; innovations trickle down to other top UGC performers.
- Google Phones benefit from mobile improvements to Flash. The Android and Nexus One become more marketable, and Google licenses Flash to the Blackberries and other mobile players.
- And, of course, the obvious: every media-savvy site uses Flash and it rolls up 75% of online video, plus marketers like flashy display banners, so Google owns more of the food chain – from media co’s to video players to brands and their agencies looking to stand out in a very noisy internet environment.
XBox Gamechanger, Project Natal
From the latest E3 announcements – Project Natal – where “You are the Controller.” In an effort to blow past the Wii accelerometer, Microsoft’s anti-controller approach literally changes the game on console gaming. Many believed that Microsoft and Sony Playstation would have to merely copy the Wii remote to stay competitive, but with this latest “Minority Report” like gameplay (“sans remote”), one wonders if there is a competitive next step or manuever possible. With Spielberg as part of the E3 Announcement – the same Spielberg who partnered to create “Boom Blox” with Nintendo – the only issue now is workability – will the device match the demo?
Per SAI comments: Natal motion control has a special non-light sensitive sensor, an RGB sensor, a depth sensor, a multi-array microphone and a special processor, and will be packaged with future Xbox consoles. Definitely a very competitive game-changer to the Nintendo Wii.
Dreamworks’ Reliance on Disney
Just in case you actually might have been living in Fantasyland for a portion of last month, and missed the news of the Disney/DreamWorks (with Reliance funding) deal here’s a recap, background info and a few innovation questions good measure. Walt Disney Studios will be marketing 6 DreamWorks live-action features per year. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Disney will earn at least an 8 percent fee off the box office gross of DreamWorks films, and would lend the studio $150 million. Read more >>
The Maze of Mobile Innovation
It may be true that Nokia sells more phones in a month than Apple has sold of the iPhone 3G since its release last July. It may also be true that the iPhone is not the ultimate expression of mobile computing and communication, or that the negatives associated with its closed platform will outweigh the positives. And it is undoubtedly true that anyone who works in the mobile industry, particularly in California, is suseptible to Apple Fanaticism, the iPhone Bubble of Hype, and a distorted sense of the iPhone’s penetration across the country and around the world. Read more >>
The 10,000-Hour Rule
Start tracking your hours… Malcolm Gladwell’s third book increases his lead in the ‘innovation as essay’ market. Outliers: The Story of Success walks in with a metaphor: that it takes 10k hours, as a general rule, of experience to become successful. Examples: Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems (early access to university computer labs), Bill Gates (early to high school computers), and The Beatles’ crucible (8-hour gigs in Hamburg 7 days a week, before they ‘invaded’ the US).