2007 - Looking back
Saturday, December 29th, 2007End of year is closing in on us way too quickly! And I am starting to think about what next year will have in store, and what the past two years did bring. 2006 and 2007 has been two fairly good years in my Entrepreneurial life, not everything turned out as planned (but as Eisenhower said; “Planning is essential, plans are worthless”). A small recap of the last two years
- Gaming company. Started a financial spread betting company, which brought some interesting insights into how things synthetic options, CFD’s and prediction markets work. The company was sold to a public company.
- Internet companies. Beginning of 2007, I started a new Internet company, GlocalReach Ltd with two co-founders, based on ideas that there is more to VoIP than cheap calls, and there are some interesting opportunities to redefine how communication is done, 6 months later and a lot of brainstorming this resulted in the ReachCard concept which I think has a very interesting potential (read more on the GlocalReach website). I also did (for me) a major investment in a well established community website for programmers (Programmers Heaven), that have been around for 8 years, and have over 200 000 members, and finally I got involved in a web payment company, were we are looking at a trade-sale beginning of 2008, which might be the start of an involvement with a new small but public Internet company.
My ideas about what 2007 would be. I was looking through some blog drafts, that I never published, and found these notes about what I thought 2007 would be.
- Increasing number of user contributed websites and communities.
- A more widespread use of micro payments driven by user getting paid for their contributed content and services.
- A steady flow of new niche online services, that will show the that you do not have to be Google or Microsoft to succeed.
- Microsoft will make it’s full Launch of online services with Windows Live, which will stir things up (will be interesting to see what comes out of this!)
Number one I would have to say have been even more than I expected, especially with the enourmous momentum that FaceBook got this year. And I do see a large number of smaller niche services that are flourishing, which I think is great. Microsoft have done some agressive moves into online services, but have not made the impact I would have thought. Maybe there area is a thing of the past, and their transcendence into the “Google-area” is too tough for them. Personally I though that I would do the following:
- Start a new VoIP service company.
- A number of “.com” refurbished ideas (some of them could also be called Web 2.0 ideas).
- Online knowledge based intelligence service.
Well I did one of the above (VoIP company; GlocalReach Ltd), and few other things. I still have a business idea back-log that I have yet to realize (but I always have..!), so that will be on my agenda for 2008, as well as blogging more, I did get some very encouraging feedback on my blog from the Swedish guys at Disruptive.nu, which is always a good motivator, and I will try to share my ideas more often during 2008!
