Nicolai Wadstrom on Entrepreneurship

This is what real-time search and the future of advertising is all about. This is were context matching, location based services converge. Whoever is the best at matching a context of a particular user with any offering, product and service will be the big winner in online advertising (which I guess is the monetization model fir Siri).

TechCrunch writes:

You simply speak into the phone with a request like, “Find something to do in San Francisco this weekend.”  It turns your speech to text and pushes your request out to an appropriate service on the Web such as Eventful or Citysearch, in this case.  It not only attempts to bring you back the appropriate information based on context, time of day, and your location, but with your permission can go ahead and make reservations or buy tickets as well.  (Read our extensive first-look coverage from last year or watch this sneak-peak video)

Read more here: Siri’s IPhone App Puts A Personal Assistant In Your Pocket

TechCrunch wrote about Bodega today. Bodega is a very interesting idea, and I think we will see more and more of these.

But I wonder when the SEC:s an FSA:s of the world will start to regulate these as some form of banking business…

As more games on the web begin to embrace virtual currency, users often run into the same problem: they’ve racked up mountains of whatever currency they’ve been playing with, but then don’t have a way to actually do anything with it outside of that game. Sure, they can always buy the latest tractor or weapon to arrive in their game, but at some point that gets old and they’re ready to cash out and move on to something new. Enter Bodega, a new platform that’s looking to help users swap virtual goods and currencies across different games, and even across different social networks.

More at TechCrunch:

Bodega: A Cross-Platform Marketplace That Lets Gamers Swap Virtual Currencies For Cash

I am sure this will not hit, but they are on to something.

I think we are going to see a number of specific purpose devices that are in fact a mobile phone data device behind the scenes.

I’m sure the TweeterPeek is a wonderful device, but most feature phones now include a Twitter app. So if you’re really getting into Twitter, first reevaluate your life, and then check out your cell phone provider’s offers to make sure you simply can’t upgrade your phone to get access to Twitter. Or you can just drop $200 on the TweeterPeek and call it good. Your call.

More at CrunchGear: The TwitterPeek is a Peek that tweets

The mobile phone is the new Internet I think; from GigaOM today:

“The insight on web 2.0 is the web isn’t this strange place but is actually part of how we navigate our actual life, so with the web delivered to a mobile device, one of these things that will happen is that the same principle will now also be true for real-time applications and apps where people can do stuff from their phone,” Hoffman said.

GigaOM

Interesting:

“This may be the best time in years for an investor to become an angel. But that doesn’t mean you should rush out to get yourself fitted for wings and a halo.

An angel investor is anyone who privately provides capital to a promising business, often a start-up, that isn’t run by a friend or family member. Scott Shane, an economist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, estimates that the U.S. has at least 140,000 active angels who collectively invest some $20 billion a year in new businesses.”

Heavenly Returns for Angel Investors? - WSJ.com.

Great post at GigaOM:

As this cloud stack hardens, new applications and services –- previously unthinkable -– will come to light, in all shapes and sizes. But the one thing they will all have in common is Big Data.

Read the full “The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud“

Been working hard on BootstrapLabs and Whiteboard Accelerator, so have not have had much time for to post something here on the blog, but, now I am seeing some result of all the work, and we are having a launch party for Whiteboard Accelerator, so if you are in the Bay area on the 10th of November this fall, and working with startup and tech companies, no matter if you are an investors, founder or doing business developments, feel free to join us!

Our entire community will be there…. delegations from France and Mexico with interesting companies, members of our advisory network, our business development team, service vendors in the Whiteboard ecosystem, and of course our founding team!

This is a low-key networking event with refreshments to celebrate our kick-off of business and showcase our team.

If you are coming, RSVP Here!

So I have been telling everybody (well almost) I know that I would like something to replace the basic thing I always carry around; pen and paper. So I wanted a tablet with a decent battery life, and that would allow me to use fingers and pen to capture and consume information.

Is this what the rumored Apple tablet will bring?

Nobody knows, except Steve Jobs and the team at Apple working on this.

With-out the analysis of Apple release schedules I think I can make some serious speculation; if Apple is in fact going to release an Apple Tablet this fall, it will:

• Run some version of Mac OS X. Why? Because most Mac OS X apps will work on different screen sizes and with touch instead of a mouse.
• Not run iPhone OS. Why? Because existing iPhone apps would most likely break on the bigger screen…
• Most likely offer a way of selling Touch based OS X (or perhaps any OS X) apps through an AppStore of some sort.

So there I have done it, been part of the Apple rumor machine; and yes; I am bit ashamed And yes if there is a tablet, and if it’s good enough to replace my pen and paper for my simple information needs, I will buy it to stop lugging around my MacBook Pro…

How can that be legal? Or ethical? Maybe there is a thin line between journalism reporting the “news”, but internal documents was stolen and providing fuel for TechCrunch’s revenues (now I am capitalist and entrepreneur, so there is no wrong in making money, but stolen goods is not ok).

The statement; “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” kind of falls flat when journalists live of advertising.

Besides, Twitter is a private company, held be a very private group. For public companies, journalists have a responsibility to uncover certain things, to the public (and thus their shareholders), but not for private companies.

Now if those documents would prove that Twitter was doing something illegal or unethical that would be a different story, but this is internal strategies, meetings etc, it’s the company counterpart of somebody taking your diary and publishing the juicy parts on the Internet.

After being here for awhile I am starting to get a grip on what is going on in the Venture Capital world here in the Silicon Valley. The Venture Capital funds are going through a tough period at the moment. There are still a number of investments being made (and compared to Europe there still a higher volume of VC funding being done).

So what have happened? The US VC industry raised over 100 B USD for their funds in the past 3 years, but investment volume has declined dramatically (1/6 annualised in 2009 compared to 2008), so many of the Silicon Valley VC’s have a great deal of cash to invest (but there are exceptions to this of course).

What has changed is the willingnes to take risk, most VC’s are currently acting out of the uncertainty of future, will the US VC industry be able to keep raising an average in of 30B - 35B USD per year for their funds?

And…

How long will they have to support their current investment portfolio companies?

And this last question is the real pressing one for most investors here in Silicon Valley.

What happened is that the VC firm’s exit pipeline has dried out, due to a number of factors, IPO’s are tuffer, caused not only by the credit crunch but also due to the Sarbanes-Oxley act creating overhead (which means IPO’s at later stages), the M&A pipline is pretty dry as well. Even though some of the big corporations actually do have large cash positions to acquire companies (or liquid shares to pay with), they are pressing the valuations down due to the tuffer IPO climate.

A real interesting opportunity at the moment here in the Valley is alternative exit path’s, however you can create them. And what we are talking about is a way for the VC’s to sell their positions in their portfolio companies, not necessarily over the stock market, but to other parties that are not typical M&Q deals, but rather new investors buying them out.

So here is a great business opportunity for alternative and new solutions for this, one is Tim Drapers Xchange (that I wrote about a few weeks ago), if I was in the investment banking industry or connected with the big long-term investment funds, I would start a new company to target this. I would not build an alternative trading marketing such as XChange, but instead look at how I can connect the VC’s to longer to these term investors.