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 for 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

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 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

“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.

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“

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!

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…

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.

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.

Think of it like TechCrunch for people, PeopleCrunch was in-fact taken

More at bootstrapradar.com

I think when things are though, and problems are real and hard, is when the entrepreneurs get to work. And create brilliant business, solve it.

The credit crunch combined with the though regulatory framework here in the US, has really halted the Silicon Valley IPO’s. The other week OpenTable went public, and was off to a good start (59% up in the first day), but this was really the first Silicon Valley IPO in about 1,5 year.

But the exit-path for angel investors and VC’s is still very though, and this also means it’s tough, to use stock-option programs to keep the talent in the startups here in the valley.

This has created a number of new exit paths, and liquidity platforms for the startups, one of which is Tim Draper’s Xchange, Inc. To be traded here on the XPO (XChange Private Offering), you need to have at least $ 20 M in revenues, and there is a large number of potential companies that are interested.The XPO uses a Dutch auction system to set the prices (a very interesting touch IMHO). Companies with less than € 20 M in revenues are restriced to the XIQ (XChange InQuest) , which is less of an trading platform, and more of a buyer/seller matching platform, simply put somewhat like an classified ad board for shares (the difference in effect is small, except the dutch auction style pricing, but I guess the regulatory issues might be quite different between these two).

It will be interesting to follow this development, and I think there is much room for more players in this segment, all from very small cap companies to more large cap companies on different trading platforms, with companies in different stages of risk. Much as we have seen in Sweden’s many small cap trading lists, with both some really good results (with mobile tech companies such as MobiSpine (on AktieTorget) and some examples that have had some controversy to it.

Here in the US (and Silicon Valley) I think it all depends on how SEC and the new administration will see these things. As something that spark glow into healthy parts of the economy eco-system, or as something that needs to be heavy regulated.

UPDATED: Some feedback Tim Draper (the company name is actually XChange not Exchanged, my mistake), and I elaborated a bit on the difference between XPO and XIQ offered by XChange, Inc.

So I am now in the Valley, that is Silicon Valley. I am slowing getting settled with everything, and getting some traction behind my different projects with-in BootstrapLabs (such as Prezi). It’s Friday afternoon, and pretty tired, I have had a very productive week with some very good meeting with everything from CTO’s in some top companies to Entrepreneurs and founders of some of the most well-known Internet startups in the valley.

I see great progress for the first initial companies that BootstrapLabs is bringing over to the valley from Europe

BootstrapLabs has got it’s office now in Redwood City, and I am working with some people here in the valley to build a very interesting incubator model with associated business development activities.

I think we will be able to offer an very attractive model for companies to get established in the valley and get successful.

All and all, a great few weeks, I hit the ground running and is still trying to get some orientation of everything that is happening. I am having great fun, and the wheather have been terrific (28-35 C during the days), besides the amazing people and business climate.

Mostly because it is happening outside of those large enterprises. The social web is getting to every corner of the globe quickly, and it is connecting people with each other, allowing them to work together, share knowledge information in an unprecedented pace and scale. And Siebel I think you kind of missed, most of this happens in the valley still (Yes some of it is happening elsewhere, but all databases and CRM systems were not created in the valley either!)

When Google got some real traction and started utilizing the power of the Internet to it’s advantage, they also opened up for an enormous eco-system around them.

A lot of services could not find it’s customers online before Google, and a lot of revenue could not be realized even though the buyers and sellers were all in-place, with all their payment systems and what-ever else needed. Google connected the missing link, and created a lot new opportunities for to connect in a large eco-system.

I think this serves as a good example of how a lonely place is not a good place for business. Now that I am setting up BootstrapLabs in Silicon Valley, some people (outside of the Entrepreneurial sphere) ask me, isn’t the competition fierce there? Why not go to the emering markets, such as Asia? Well it’s about criticial mass and eco-systems.

Being all alone, with-out competition, partners, or being the first one in a market is not only less fun, it’s extremely hard, capital intensive, and is the opposite of capitalism actually – capitalism drives everyone to be better and specialize, something that is only possible when you can be part of an eco-system (where others specialize in the things you don’t).

Internet is free and open and business is very much a social thing, it’s about interactions between people, and Google bridged a gap to help people connect with other people, information, knowledge and services on the Internet. Google actually made the Internet a less lonely place.

From the social internet that is emerging right now, I think new business eco-systems are also emerging, they are all in their infancy still, but it is happening. And they are really starting to change not only the Internet, and business online, but the very foundation of our societies.

We are indeed living in exciting times, and I would have to say that agree with my friend Christian, “I love the Internet!”.

So we have now signed an agreement with Prezi to help them establish a US presence.  It is part of an agreement between Prezi, BootstrapLabs and CrossConnect, to provide Prezi with advisory and strategic planning and help Prezi establish a senior advisory board, secure an initial round of funding from business angels, and to reach cash flow positive with-in 12 months, and prepare for a US market entry and scale-up.

Prezi is a leading provider of a new zooming presentation technology. It allows presenters to move beyond the slide-by-slide approach and to simply create amazing non-linear presentations. Prezi launched it’s product 5th of April 2009 after a year of a closed beta period.
This week Prezi also won the award “Most likely to succeed” by the Swedish angel investor network Connect Sweden (East), which gives the company access to a a large number of business angel investors.

I am very exciting about working with Prezi, and believe this is a very disruptive product.

Read more here…

I also argued Micro-blogging is the “next search”, seems Google might agree with me. Interesting to see how this plays out the next few weeks!

Prezi is a presentation tool that provides an non-linear way of presenting information, in contrast to the slide-by-slide PowerPoints that we are used to.

Think about it, PowerPoint is really just the old slide projector in digital form (and some bells and whistles that allows adding sounds and video). But almost all PowerPoint presentations that I have seen could just as easily have been done on the old printed transparent slides.

With Prezi you have a blank canvas, that can be as big as you want, and you can Zoom in on the details, go back to the overview and then into another details. The presentation don’t have to go step-by-step.

However, Prezi provides an step-by-step mode, which is useful for sending presentations to people and give then an idea of your intended order of digesting the information/presentation.

This is achieved using Paths through the canvas, that get users an intended flow. Users can always pan or zoom into areas of particular interest. There is not limit how deep in or out you can zoom.

It takes a bit getting used too, but now I am starting to use Prezi for everything from presentations to documenting workshops and brainstorming sessions.

The Zoomable canvas and very simple editing makes it quite quick to work with, and especially effective when trying to capture an unstructured flow of ideas and information.

Try it out, and tell me what you think of Prezi!

The cloud computing is a lot more disruptive than I thought.

And I thought cloud computing was very disruptive and the slow decline of local software and associated license models.

What I am now realising is that cloud computing is also disrupting a IT service industry segments that have so far have been harder to *-source somewhere else. Part of this is in cost-reductions of doing things in larger scale datacenters as well.

Now almost any company can host the majority of the compute power needed remotely. And once they do that, why would they employ local services for assistence when everything is done remotely anyway (on the Internet it’s just as far to Bangalore), but most importantly things are becoming clearly defined and packaged in it’s offerings. This will drive another way of *-sourcing, not only to lower-wage countries, but it will disrupt many service companies in the IT sector.

Some of the online media covered this recently, IDG (Swedish).