Logoworks tackles Spur branding
May 31, 2006
Michael Arrington wrote about Logoworks recent redesign (I like it much better now). He even had them take a pass at the TechCrunch logo. We have been talking about Logoworks for a long while and have used their service on seven projects. Our latest is the branding of our new company name: Spur. Here are their latest comps, what do you think?
Texas Pacific Group Raises New Fund
May 31, 2006
The TPG guys (Fort Worth) are raising their second biotech fund with a $400MM target size. They plan to invest $20MM per company and have already made a few investments including a round for drug developer Avidia, Five Prime Therapeutics and FoldRx.
For those of you who don’t know about TPG (from their website):
Texas Pacific Group is a leading global private investment firm with over $20 billion of capital under management. We manage a family of funds including private equity, venture capital and public equity and debt investing. Since the firm’s founding in 1992, our investment philosophy has been to create value by investing in change - change created by industry trends, economic cycles or specific company circumstances.
Targeting users with Valleyschwag!
May 31, 2006
The Big in Japan team decided they didn’t have enough female users so they decided to use Valleyschwag’s May edition to reach some of the most clued in and influential women in the world. They created a summer edition of their Mash-Up shirt just for female subscribers of Valleyschwag. The shirts are babydoll style and are specifically sized for each female subscriber. Sorry guys! Meirla posted hers to flickr first:
Big in Japan released SocialMail
May 30, 2006
Big in Japan released SocialMail last week without much fanfare. The latest powertool released by the Biggu team allows users to create email addresses that are accessible via RSS only. Reading your email via RSS feeds is not unique, Google has allowed it for a while. What is unique is that the addresses are casual, meaning you can give the feed to anyone and allow them to read messages sent to the address. You would not want to give out your Google RSS feed, but it makes sense to release your SocialMail feed:
- Non managed mailing lists (i.e. you don’t need to mess with adding and deleting users)
- Catch-all email addresses (sales@, careers@ and so on)
- Turn existing mailing lists into a feed
- Repurposed content (take any email content and deliver it via feed to a website)
Web 2.0 = jumped the shark. . .
May 25, 2006
I think May 24th, 2006 will be the date that everyone decides that the term Web 2.0 is tired and should be taken out behind the woodshed and shot.
Why the 24th? On that date, CMP working with O’Reilly Media sent a cease and desist letter to IT@Cork claiming they own the term and that they can’t use it in the title of their event: Web 2.0 half-day conference. My advice to Tom Raftery? Let CMP and O’Reilly keep the term.
If only we could all agree to stop using it. We are changing the logo of Big in Japan to remove the reference to Web 2.0. This blog is getting a make over and all references to Web 2.0 will be removed. Soon we will be Web 2.0-free!
Weblogs Work at Aspen Institute
May 24, 2006
Brian was in Washington DC this week speaking at the Aspen Institute on Disaster Communications. He has become something of an expert on the use of social media during a crisis. He talked with Tom Evslin while at the meeting, have a listen to his interview from Weblogs Worknotes:
My Laptop is Internet Famous!
May 23, 2006
The Valleyschwag guys featured my laptop in the “Battle of the Laptop Stickers.“Â I am confident that “my laptop will kick your laptop’s butt!”
SuperNova2006: Connected Innovators
May 23, 2006
Mike and Kevin selected twelve companies to serve as ‘Connected Innovators‘ to be held at the SuperNova conference this year. Here is the list:
- Ether.com
- Fleck.com
- LicketyShip
- LifeIO
- NetVibes
- PostApp
- Sharpcast
- SoonR
- StumbleUpon
- Vpod.tv
- Webaroo
- ZiXXo
Smart post: media more vc than vcs?
May 21, 2006
I don’t agree with Umair’s politics (even a little), but he writes interestings posts. His most recent I found most interesting: Research Note: Discovering the Wrong Future - Denuo Mini Case Study.
(I also like the smart car too, no connection…via)
Regional Fed Board Reform!
May 20, 2006
Brad Feld has an interesting post about several questions the Fed Governors asked him to report on. I won’t repeat them here, you can read it there instead. The most interesting thing you can gleen from the questions is that the Fed really has no idea how venture capital investing works.
Can you imagine? Brad’s buddy, who sits on the board of the regional Federal Reserve Bank, said it best, “The Fed actually seems to know little about venture investing. I think I am the only director in the entire system with an early-stage background.” Brad is terrified by this idea - me too…
I have a crazy idea, bring on a minimum of one startup CEO or venture capital partner to each regional Federal Reserve bank.
Cork’d: Dan’s second baby this year!
May 17, 2006
Dan has been busy both personally and professionally. He has been so busy he hasn’t been able to work on several of our Big in Japan projects. But we still love him! He just announced his new site he and Dan Benjamin created called Cork’d. The site is devoted to the reviewing and sharing of wine.
So Dan and Ben decided that wine needed Microformats and as a result they are busy adding tags to wine. Who knew! I can’t wait until wine makers start putting little tags on the bottom of their lables: fruity
They also struck a partnership with wine.com who seeded their database with 1200 wines. Why did they build it? Dan says, “simply because we wanted to use it.” Good luck guys, it looks great!
Weblogs Work @ Syndicate 2006
May 17, 2006
Our very own Brian Oberkirch, CEO of Weblogs Work, is speaking this week at Syndicate 2006. But I suspect he is having more fun hanging out with Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom! He got to do a video interview with her at the conference that he will be posting to Weblogs Worknotes when he gets a minute.
The opposite of what entrepreneurs need:
May 17, 2006
My venture wire alert came this morning and I got a chuckle when I heard that 25-year-old Brock Blake started a company to help entrepreneurs meet angel investors. He holds “speed pitching events” and charges $500 to $1,000 to attend. He also helps entrepreneurs make videos of their pitches and posts them online for angels to view.
Venture Wire said it best, “in a sign that everything old can be new again in the world of Web 2.0, FundingUniverse has raised capital to back its service offering entrepreneurs and angel investors a way to network locally.” As it turns out Grow Utah Ventures and Provo Labs, and according to the comapny, they provided “less than $1MM in financing”. BTW: what is less than $1MM in financing? something between $1 and $999,999 I guess. I think it would have been better to say that they provided less than $100,000,000 in financing - don’t you?
Brock should start reading Jason’s Signal vs. Noise blog. . .
International Vacation Spots!
May 16, 2006
If safety is your number one concern when picking a vacation destination you might consider visiting Iraq this summer. As it turns out it is safer than many other locations around the globe. Iraq has a violent death rate of 25 per 100,000 people, compare that rate to:
- Columbia (62/100,000 - more than double)
- South Africa (50/100,000 - double)
- Jamacia (32/100,000)
- New Orleans (53/100,000)
FYI - don’t mention that you are an American if you go to Iraq…
Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part One)
May 16, 2006
It all started with a post from Nick Douglas I wrote called, “Got a great idea? Join the Napking Club.” This is the first in a series of posts I plan to post on how an idea can get from a cocktail napkin to reality. “How do you do it?” That is a question I hear all of the time from people interested in starting their own business. The answer seems so simple to me, I never really undestood why people asked it until recently. What changed? It all started when we took a cold hard look at our business. We really had two lines of business (a) investing in other people’s ideas and businesses and (b) turning our own ideas into businesses. We figured out that we were failing miserably on (a) but having great financial and non-financial success on (b). In one week we decided to stop investing in other people’s ideas and focus exclusively on our own. To better reflect our new mission we changed the name of the company and disassociated ourselves from the VC or private equity business. Clearly some people know how to invest in businesses and other seem to know how to start them. We decided that we didn’t fit in the former, but instead into the latter group of people.*
That realization helped me understand why so many people asked me, “How do you do it?” We spent almost five years talking to entrepreneurs with ideas who couldn’t get their idea off of the cocktail napkin and into the hands of customers. Throughout that period of time we found a few we decided to fund, but 99% of the time we found more reasons not to fund their businesses. I decided to document how we take an idea from a cocktail napkin (literally) and turn it into a business (no promises on whether or not it will be successful).
*I think our shift was also a realization that most of the businesses we were most interested in didn’t need our money. This is a something new and exciting for entrepreneurs. We were so excited we decided to focus on being entrepreneurs than investors.
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