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Posts Tagged ‘Six Months’

Think Your Start-up Is Venture Worthy? Think Again.

Pepperdine has a new study out that attempts to shed some light on the clubby, shadowy world of private finance. Researchers polled experts in lending, mezzanine capital, private equity, venture capital and private businesses themselves. Not a big shock, but things don’t look pretty, especially in the venture capital world.

A lot of the stats weren’t surprising. According to VCs, there’s been a 65% decrease in up-rounds (where a company gets a bigger valuation) in the last six months and more than 60% of those polled expect a longer wait for an exit. Similarly, the bulk of the companies getting funding are still California-based.

There does seem to be some shifts on where the money is going. After Northern California and Southern California the biggest area of investment geographically was in international companies. And investors said they intend to invest more in cleantech than software going forward. This is a big reversal, as software has long been the dominant category for venture deals, but it’s unknown whether software has lost favor, or whether it’s just become so pervasive that it doesn’t really hold together as a category anymore.

But it’s when you look between the survey of VCs and the survey of private businesses that things start to get ugly. The businesses, it seems, vastly over-estimate their ability to raise funds. 41% of them feel that they qualify for venture capital funding. Meanwhile, the VCs surveyed indicated that they’re only doing a few deals every six months and go through one hundred business plans to close one deal. Clearly, the rate of acceptance isn’t anything like 41%, says researcher John K. Paglia, Pepperdiine’s Denney Academic Chair and Associate Professor of Finance.

A few more stats make that picture look worse. Researchers divided the portfolio companies into six stages and the startup is still operating a loss in each of the first four. Those categories represent roughly 84% of all portfolio companies. That means the vast majority of privately held companies are still very dependent on venture money to stay in business. And investors aren’t necessarily keen on their prospects. Respondents deemed between 12%-16% of companies generating revenues to be essentially “worthless” and deemed 20%-26% of their pre-revenue investments to be “worthless.”

Add to this that 72.7% of VCs said they had a decreased appetite for risk and that more than half of those polled expect to do between zero and three deals in the next year and you start to get the feeling things are going to get a lot worse for private companies, in aggregate, before they get better.

Of course life isn’t that much better for the VCs: Sixty percent of them say their own prospects for raising new funds have declined over the last six months and 41% said they aren’t planning on even attempting it in 2010.

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DARPA-based Siri virtual assistant hits the App Store, smartphone sentience can’t be far behind (video)

It’s been well over six months since we first got wind of Siri, the DARPA-inspired smartphone app that pledged to take all the hassle out of… well… life. It’s a virtual assistant that can take care of menial tasks, things like finding restaurants, hearing reviews, and even booking tables — all with your voice. Siri asks simple questions and reacts to your answers, and while it sadly seems to have lost some of its military feel since its DARPA days (bummer), it’s a lovely companion to your happening lifestyle. Plus it’s free, and free is good! Check out a demonstration video after the break, and hit up the App Store to make with the download. Meanwhile, if you’re on some other smartphone platform you’ll have to wait. We fully expect Siri will break free of its current monotasking abode sometime in the future, but we don’t know when. We just don’t know when.

Continue reading DARPA-based Siri virtual assistant hits the App Store, smartphone sentience can’t be far behind (video)

DARPA-based Siri virtual assistant hits the App Store, smartphone sentience can’t be far behind (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Former Current TV strategist Sloan jumps to Twitter

Robin Sloan, a former strategist and executive at Current TV, is joining Twitter to handle media partnerships. He says he’ll help “producers, reporters, developers and strategists at media orga­nizations that want to do cool, transformative things with tweets.”

He was recruited by a former colleague Chloe Sladden, who experimented with one of the earliest of uses of Twitter against a live broadcast. During the first presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, Sloan built an application that would overlay curated tweets over the bottom of the screen (see the video below).

He didn’t give any specifics as to how he sees Twitter working with media organizations. Instead, he pointed to how quickly the company’s ecosystem has evolved.

He wrote on his blog:

“I feel like I’m constantly learning and re-​​learning how to use Twitter. And I think that’s because, paired with this odd constraint, you’ve got this crazy openness—this refusal to specify exactly what you’re supposed to do with the service, or how, or even why. So those determinations fall to us, and as a result, the whole thing seems to be convulsing and transforming, like, every six months.”

Sloan was auspiciously also the author of Twitter’s five billionth tweet.

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Hulu’s subscription service might run $5 for access to select shows

There was a mini-internet revolt the last time NBC Universal’s TV chief started talking about ways to actually turn a profit from Hulu and the search for a balance continues. People familiar with the matter — our favorite source by the way — told the LA Times that the search in question could take another six months before official pricing is announced, but the latest idea being thrown around is to charge a $5 per month subscription for access to older shows. A quick search of Hulu just showed that only the past four or five episodes of newer shows are currently available, so charging for older shows means new access to additional content. We have to say that offering additional programming above and beyond what is currently free is a pretty good strategy, but the other one we’d like to see is a premium option to view content commercial free — no word on if any of the paid content will still have commercials. The one thing this won’t change is the fact that the content creators already sold the rights to these shows on the TV, which of course means Hulu won’t be able to stop going out of its way to block things like Boxee and the PS3 — still kind of shocked that PlayOn isn’t effected.

Hulu’s subscription service might run $5 for access to select shows originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Automatic Data For The People’s Apps From The UK Gov

The U.K. government has decided to make the non-personal data it holds available for web developers to create a new wave of public applications. It’s a bold move which will open up more data than even the U.S. government holds at its Data.gov. The new Data.gov.uk site is officially launched today by Web creator Sir Tim Berners Lee and been has been running for the last six months in beta with almost 3,000 data sets available. By contrast, the U.S. site Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets. So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and 10 applications built. These include PlanningAlerts, a free service that emails you if someone has put in a planning application to build near your house and FillThatHole, which lets people report potholes and other road hazards across the UK.

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Twitter’s Growth Slows Dramatically

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter’s growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter’s growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago.

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Most Twitter users, however – even if they are now more engaged on average – still have fewer than 100 followers. Only 18% of all Twitter users have more than 100 followers. A total of 81% of all users are currently also following less than 100 people. Just 6 months ago, the average user was just following around 40 accounts.

HubSpot’s analysis also shows that more Twitter users now include bios (54%), links (65%) and location data (41%) in their profiles.

International Footprint Increases

As we pointed out earlier this month, social media analytics firm Sysomos also noted that most of Twitter’s growth is currently happening internationally. According to HubSpot’s analysis of over 5 million Twitter accounts, 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations are now outside of North America. In July 2009, only 15% were from outside North America.

For Twitter, this means that its current user base is making better use of the service, but the company also has to worry that its growth is slowing down. Maybe some of the earlier high growth rates were inflated by spam accounts, but a 3.5% growth rate is very low and the overall trend is only pointing down at this time.

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webOS paid apps coming to Europe in March 2010
Okay, so this is quite the lag from October’s North American availability, but at least when the paid portion of Palm’s App Catalog rolls out across Europe it shouldn’t experience the stuttering start it suffered back in the US of A. Palm has excitedly blurted out the news on its developer network blog, but not without the requisite garnishings of buzzwords like “leverage,” “freedom,” “choice,” “control,” and “speed,” as well as something about “faster cycle times” — all of it designed to get more developers onboard. Kinda ironic the company is boasting about fast cycle times when it can’t transition its paid Catalog to Europe in less than six months, but hey — the Pre already has that one killer app, and it’s free, so what do you care?

[Thanks, Ben]

webOS paid apps coming to Europe in March 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Meet the 12 Lucky Browsers European IE Users Will Be Shown Next Year

As part of the European Union’s antitrust agreement with Microsoft, the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser.

Love or hate the government intervention, it’s notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

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On the Front Page – The Best Known 5

The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous six months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010.

Right now the top five will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program:

• Apple Safari – that’s right, even for Windows!
• Google Chrome – so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer – gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn’t the EU just require people to stop using IE 6?
• Mozilla Firefox – the classic that’s most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it’s done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance.
• Opera – loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans.

Below the Fold – The Smaller Challengers

Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here’s who the EU lists as those browsers today.

• AOL – chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days.
• Maxthon – is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on beating Opera in Europe.
• K-Meleon – says it’s a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses.
• Flock – is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It’s got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don’t you love Flock?
• Avant Browser – says that it, in fact, is the browser that’s the fastest. It includes an in-line RSS reader and a number of other interesting features.
• Sleipnir – is a highly-customizable browser that says it’s big in Japan.

Slim Browser – a Windows browser focused on automating processes.

That’s the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it’s needed?

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