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Moo makes a splash on YouTube

2008-03-12T22:08:00.005Z

In typical Moo fashion, the unusual has happened. Last week a video promoting their Easter Egg hunt showed up as one of the top viewed videos on YouTube - over 1.7m views so far.

This is no vanilla brand -- but rather something humorous, loved and truly viral.

Nice one guys :)

Beauty of One Box Search

2008-02-13T23:20:00.016Z

Google has made one-box searching a pleasure for the web. If the query is pretty simple and you want to find a web site rather than data, then the results, by and large are pretty good.

But you're in real trouble when you try more complex queries like "flights from London to Cape Town from May 1-12" or "property in Tribeca with 3 bedrooms". The results on Google are useless.

Traditionally vertical search engines have been better than Google at getting the right results but they have been unable to deliver a service in an such simple way with "one-box search".

Recently, Mobimissimo (an Index investment) in travel and DotHomes (a TAG investment, which used to be called Extate) in property have started to break this mould.

Although category coverage is very important in vertical search, this is relatively easy to do compared to general areas like the web, images or video as the sources of information are generally well known and fairly limited. Of course, there are major challenges in structuring data and keeping it fresh but coverage is only one piece of the jigsaw - search was never won by index size alone.

Both Mobimissimo and DotHomes offer similar or more coverage than their better known rivals such as Kayak or Trulia. But what is probably most interesting about Mobimissimo and DotHomes is that they allow queries and deliver results in an interface that is much more natural and intuitive to use -- the fabled "one-box".

To find flights on Kayak from London to Cape Town will mean you have to engage with at least 4 boxes;

with Mobissimo its one-box and when you get your results you can easily change currency, see local weather, photos from Flickr and even your Dopplr contacts.

Meanwhile in real estate, if you type "Tribeca 3 beds" into Trulia you get no results - in fact an error page;

but on DotHomes you not get results, you also get the requisite map and of course the ability to further filter results -- one box, natural language queries and immediately.

Of course it doesn't help that the prices are still sky high but at least you can find what you were looking for :)

These are some early examples of what hopefully will be a more general trend in search. Its not easy to do, but when done right a simple and natural query interface can produce a great user experience which will surely drive transaction volume significantly in critical and high-value verticals. Google did this with web search and I think the innovators in vertical search will make similar UI leaps.

If you have any other great examples, I'd love to hear about them.

Kindo's day in the sun

2008-02-13T21:58:00.015Z

Its easy to throw stones at Alexa - and we all have - but sometimes whatever the reason, its nice to have a day in the sun.

This has been a great few weeks for Kindo. Last week they announced seed funding from the technology founders of Skype, me and Robin at TAG and Stefan Glaenzer from Last.fm. Now this week Kindo has sneaked past Geni and Verwandt on Alexa.

So congratulations to Gareth, Nils, Andrew, Demian and all the rest of the really hardworking and dedicated team.

Social networks have fundamentally shifted people's online behavior. There are over a billion people online now and the web is truly global and multi-lingual - it is no longer more than 25% American or English.

When you look at the diversity of social network successes, there are global players (MySpace & Facebook) but also very significant regional (Netlog, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Skyrock) and local players (Nasza-klasa and vKontakte). What's amazing of course is that none of these sites really existed more than 3 years ago and now they are the commonest ways for people to spend their time online. In almost every market, networks and search rule and portals are dying or dead.

The most common and fastest-growing online behavior today is to build, understand and communicate through your networks.

We have networks for our friends - our social networks. We have networks for our colleagues (LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo etc) - our professional networks. Increasingly we will have networks for families - not just sites about my ancestry (family past) but about my living family (family present).

Kindo has only been in the market since late October 2007 but it has made a very fast start.

Recognizing, rather than paying lip-service to the global nature of the web is a lesson we learned at Skype and have seen again at OpenAds. Kindo its already in 14 languages and not just with translations but blogs and a genuine local flavor.

Families can be way too serious and people seem to be really responding to Kindo's sense of fu n and the authenticity and sense of fun of a global brand with local sensibility.

The market for family networks is very much just at the beginning, there is a very long way to go as these services reach maturity - but sometimes it nice to have a day in the sun.

It's a big day for Open Source

2008-01-16T22:09:00.000Z

What a great day for open source. Sun announced their $1bn acquisition of MySQL and OpenAds announced that they had raised an additional $15.5m to further develop their free ad serving solutions for publishers.

When Index first invested in MySQL in June 2003, open source was a promising but by no means proven part of the mainstream Internet. Now less than 5 years later we are now living in a world where open source technologies and the LAMP stack are fundamental to the infrastructure and development priorities of any enterprise or fast-growing business.

OpenAds has been a major beneficiary of this same trend. Quietly developing over the years into a online advertising powerhouse, its software now serves billions of ad impressions at over 30,000 publishers in 140 countries and 20 languages across the web. We announced our investment in the business in June 2007 and have been thrilled at the progress made since then in both team and product development.

The $15bn database market is huge and fundamental. It also represents the technical underpinnings of the Internet as Jonathan Schwarz said today of MySQL it is "the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs".

But the global online advertising is forecast to be worth $65bn in 2010 and as several influential commentators are beginning to realize that puts OpenAds in a very interesting position. With a new hosted service making their software even more accessible to publishers, if you weren't before - watch this space.

The Business of APIs Event on Oct 15th

2007-10-08T10:34:00.000+01:00

If you're in the Bay Area next Monday Oct 15th you should try go along to the Business of APIs event.

There is an all-star roster of speakers who are living in the trenches of building great API programs and the enabling technology and services to support them, s0 if you want to understand how to leverage web services to increase your reach this is a great place to start.

Announcing the Dopplr 100

2007-09-27T09:22:00.000+01:00

Dopplr has just opened up its invitation-only social network to business travellers from 100 leading companies and international organizations.

The Dopplr 100 is a great way of slowly opening up the service to a frequent travelers from some of the world's coolest brands who have already been active users of the service and now want to spread the word to their colleagues.

Check out the list and see if you're on it -- if not and you're a frequent traveller, please send me an email and I'll give you an invite :)

TAG recently invested in Dopplr alongside some great fellow travellers.

TAG joins Mashery Series A

2007-09-27T09:05:00.000+01:00

There is a great post today covering Mashery's latest funding round by Marshall at Read/WriteWeb.

Mashery takes a lot of the pain away from company's who want to offer access to their web services API. Customers can really focus on their API and not worry about having to manage the plumbing headaches of access controls, metering, metrics, preformance scaleablity and developer tools.

This is a serious pain point in a world of mashups and APIs. Some of Mashery's current customers include Trulia, Compete and Zoominfo.

TAG is really excited to be a small investor in Mashery's latest round of financing and join Oren and Scott's great team and some excellent existing investors to help develop their presence in Europe.

Stardolls starts to showcase DKNY and Sephora

2007-09-27T08:52:00.001+01:00

Stardoll has just announced a relationship with some of LVMH's best-known fashion brands, who will be developing a presence within the Stardoll environment.

The business has taken an incredible journey from its early days in 2004 as a hobby site for Liisa, a Finnish grandmother, who developed the earliest versions of the service with her son.

This is a major step forward for the business, which has grown remarkably to having over 10m members and is one of the most popular destinations on the web for 8-17 girls to hang out and have fun.

Kiva.org Crosses $11 Million in Microloans to Developing Nations

2007-09-14T09:42:00.000+01:00

This is one of the most impressive and inspiring services online - congrats to Kiva

Kiva.org Crosses $11 Million in Microloans to Developing Nations

Closing in on Seedcamp Week 2007

2007-08-21T23:55:00.000+01:00

from the Seedcamp blog:

So much has happened with Seedcamp in the last month, thanks to you all for your energy, enthusiasm and support.

Last Sunday night we accepted the last applications for Seedcamp Week 2007 - we were thrilled to have received 268 applications from over 40 countries. Seedcamp seems to have tapped a nerve from Uruguay to the Ukraine and we're excited to work with you all in the near future to figure out how we can best harness and continue the positive momentum.

This week is selection week. Our esteemed selection panel has been putting in serious energy into analyzing the applications and slimming that list down to a final set of interviews. By the end of the week we will have final list of 20 selected companies who'll be coming to London to spend the week of Sept 3-7 with us.

One of the things we've always said about Seedcamp, is that's its not just about the cash. Success is also about have the right context, making the right connections and gaining the right coverage.

Providing the right context
We've been inspired by the informal formats of unconferences and unevents like Barcamp and Opencoffee to try and create a style which is not just about people who've done it talking at people in an audience.

We want to provide conversation not speeches, so we have a mix of sessions where Seedcampers will hear directly from some real experts but then importantly be able to spend 1:1 time with those experts to get direct feedback on their businesses.

Seedcamp is an evolving project and this is only our first year, so we welcome any ideas and feedback you have on what topics are the most interesting to you. Please join the forums and let us know.

Making the right connections
Building a great business is partly about accessing the best and brightest talent - it can often be about knowing who to ask when you are stuck with really important questions.

We've said that being a part of Seedcamp should allow you to build a rolodex in a week it would take years to build otherwise.

So, to help teams making the best connections, we have lined up expert mentors across product design & development, marketing & pr, raising money, finding exits, negotiating big partnership, handling legals and accounting, team building. Hopefully, a lot of what teams need to sharpen their pitch and develop to be a successful business.

Joining our already impressive cast of characters during Seedcamp Week and beyond, some of the folks now include:

Entreprenuerial founders including Niklas Zennstrom, Marc Samwer, Richard Moross, Martin Varsavsky, Toby Rowland, Tariq Krim, Michael Smith, Charlie Muirhead and Alex Straub
Product Development & Design gurus like Matt Jones, Tom Coates, Leisa Reichelt, Ryan Carson, Max Polyakov and Skype product & operations stars like Carter Adamson, Rodrigo Madanes, Sten Tamkivi, Annemie Rensburg and Michael Jackson
VC and individual investors like DFJ Esprit, Alexander Hoye and Mark Sonne Kharazmi
Experts from companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, SUN, Amazon Web Services, eBay, Oracle, Sky, Albion, Flow Interactive, SparkPR and Blackberry

Gaining the right coverage
Rising above the noise is critical in building your business.

To help Seedcamp teams do this, we've already partnered with Techcrunch, FT.com and the NextWeb Conference. We're now thrilled to announce three new partnerships with:

Ryan Carson's FOWA from Oct 3-5 in London
O'Reillys Web2.0 Expo from Nov 5-8 in Berlin
Loic Le Meur's LeWeb3 from Dec 11-12 in Paris

What's next for Seedcamp....
These are still early days for us. We're at the beginning of a long-term project which is focussed on building a better entrepreneurial environment in Europe for talented entrepreneurs who want to think big.

We've been thrilled by the response so far and the level of engagement from our fellow travelers on our blog, on our forums and on our ever growing public Facebook group. But most of all we've been thrilled to have as our fellow travelers everyone who has applied to Seedcamp and everyone who has become a supporter so far.

We have some exciting ideas for what's next and we really want to hear from you all about what you think we can do to best serve and encourage great talent in Europe.

But right now we're just so excited to move towards the next Act and meet the selected teams for Seedcamp Week 2007 and all the mentors in London from September 3-7th.

Talk at MIT Sloan

2007-08-18T22:47:00.000+01:00

It was great to be back in Boston after so many years and fun to take a trip down memory lane across the road from Firefly.

Some of these slides relating to opportunities outside of the US will be familiar from Nextweb and other thoughts around 3 Os and 5 Cs I've aired in part before - especially last year at Second Chance Tuesday.

Cupcakes deserve serious thought

2007-08-18T22:34:00.000+01:00

More to come...

Michael Eisner loves Spotrunner

2007-08-18T22:30:00.000+01:00

52 hours left to apply for Seedcamp

2007-08-10T19:59:00.000+01:00

Time is running out to apply for Seedcamp, so finish your applications and spread the word.

There are only 52 hours left before the application deadline of midnight GMT on Sunday Aug 12th.

We're thrilled with the amazing response from all over the world with applications from Uruguay to Ukraine, but we want to encourage you all for one final push to try and be one of the 20 companies selected to join us and a killer group of entrepreneurs, investors, product & market gurus in London from September 3rd to 7th.

Good luck -- and if you don't make it this year, were looking to seeing you next year at Seedcamp.

Netlog still bigger than Bebo

2007-07-31T02:23:00.000+01:00

They say Alexa never lies :)

With over 23m registered users and a new service just launched in Turkey, Netlog remains the great undiscovered secret of the Top 100 web.

3 TAG companies in Guardian's Top 10

2007-07-31T01:58:00.000+01:00

Nice to see three TAG companies making the list of Top 10 companies to watch.

Congrats to Moo, Mindcandy and Extate - nice photos :)

Big day for Seedcamp

2007-07-19T22:19:00.000+01:00

from the Seedcamp blog:

We've been thrilled at the interest Seedcamp has generated in such a short time since we announced it a few weeks ago. In the spirit of the new web, we've had some great guest blogs , our forums are slowly getting more active and even our Facebook group is growing like crazy - we're just crossed 600 members :)

We want Seedcamp to really help stimulate a community and conversation around European startups - so please join in, online or physically at your local Opencoffee Club. So if you're an entrepreneur with an idea, a developer with a killer app - there's no excuse to feel alone anymore.

You have until midnight August 12th to submit your completed application, we've already had nearly 100 from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the UK. We've also had applications from India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Latin America - keep them coming.

Seedcamp is completely focussed on supporting the entrepreneur. So we're thrilled that we seemed to have tapped into something that seems relevant and valuable to you. In fact, one of the things which has excited me the most is that people are recognizing that although capital is key, Seedcamp is more about the contacts, coverage and connections successful applicants will receive both in the week of September 3-7 in London and in the 3 months afterwards.

With this in mind, I'm really excited today to announce the first wave of Seedcamp supporters, who are really stepping up to play a major role not just in Seedcamp 2007 but for the years ahead. These are all people and organizations who have played a critical role in putting European entrepreneurship on the map and I'm thrilled to have them on board.

The cast in order of appearance so far are: Index Ventures, Niklas Zennstrom and Mattias Ljungman's Atomico Investments , Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Europe), TAG, Forsyth Group and Brown Rudnick. We are also thrilled to have FT.com and Techcrunch as media partners and the NextWeb Conference as an event partner.

We look forward to act two and announcing our new cast of characters in the coming weeks.

Moo gets sticky

2007-07-19T22:01:00.000+01:00

The team at Moo just can't help coming out with cool stuff. For what seems to be a simple printing company, they have one of the most fanatical followings on the web and a blog which is in the Top 1k on Technorati.

Today, they released their much anticipated third product - StickerBooks.

In true Moo fashion, the product is all about:

personal choice -- you can choose 90 different stickers on 15 tear-out sheets
quality -- stickers are high-quality gloss, scratchproof vinyl stickers
design -- your choice of 6 differently styled beautiful sticker books

Moo are also going to the next level in terms of excellent content with this release.

Now you can choose ReadyMade content some very cool designers and illustrators, in addition to being able to use your Flickr, Habbo, Bebo, Vox, Fotolog or Live Journal content for your MiniCards, NoteCards or StickerBooks.

Well done to the team, hope the party is awesome in London tonight - it certainly seems from Upcoming that there's much excitement.

Why Design Matters....

2007-07-17T21:42:00.000+01:00

There aren't enough great product designers - why?

They make or break today's businesses.

OpenCoffee London keeps growing

2007-07-11T23:22:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow will be our 20th meeting - and our Meetup group in London is now up to 713. Its fantastic to see more people joining and new faces every week.

It's also amazing to me how online groups are becoming so useful and viral - in less than a week Seedcamp's group on Facebook has close to 500 members and the global Opencoffee group on Ning is close to 1,200 people.

What a great way to keep in touch and stay connected - the web gets better every day.

Finding fellow travellers for your business

2007-07-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

A shorter version of my post on the Seedcamp blog about finding partners...

This is some practical advice on what you can do if you have a great idea - for Seedcamp, or otherwise - and you want to go about finding a partner.

It's not easy, but in this age of networks, here are some suggestions which grease the wheels.

You can start easily online:

Check out Seedcamp on Facebook - as it opens up, Groups and associated Events are becoming more powerful as networking tools
Get engaged in Seedcamp Forums - contribute to and check out ours
Use Linkedin - if you know what you're looking for it can be a powerful tool for finding the right people

But there's no substitute for the real world, so:

Opencoffee Club - now in almost 60 cities around the world from Boston to Zagreb. You are likely to be close to one and if not, start one and see who turns up. You'll find you can meet in person co-founders, fellow entrepreneurs and folks to build your team
Barcamp - a really inspiring phenomenon, a place to meet great hackers and people passionate about building products
Meetup - pretty much in every city, you can find experts on most topics, take your pick

Good luck in finding your partners - it's worth it and your business will be better for it.

Openads releases 2.3 beta and appoints CEO

2007-07-05T23:48:00.000+01:00

Openads is really on a roll at the moment.

Congratulations to the team who have just released the public release of their new 2.3 beta which is a major step forward in terms of performance, functionality and ease of use.

And congratulations to James Bilefied, my old colleague from Skype, who was announced yesterday as Openads CEO. James' experience at Yahoo! and Skype makes him a great hire for a business well positioned to disrupt the online advertising space with its free open source ad server.

Exciting times ahead.

Launching Seedcamp

2007-07-03T20:39:00.000+01:00

The covers are coming off - slowly this week, but with increased momentum going forward.

We talked about Seedcamp last week at Library House's conference and now we've soft-launched the web site.

We've been talking about the possibilities since earlier this year and now we're really excited to get the ball rolling.

We're looking for the brightest and the best young entrepreneurs across Europe, Middle East and Africa to blow us away with their ideas for game-changing businesses.

So if you are one of these game-changers, stop now - please apply.

If you'd like to join our network of mentors (entrepreneurs, investors, product designers, developers, lawyers, recruiters, marketing specialists etc) to help support one - let me know personally or in the comments below.

Or, if you're just interested in what we're doing, please check out the presentation below and visit the still in formation Seedcamp.com.

Whatever you do - please spread the word :)

Going to Essential Web event on Wed 27th June

2007-06-25T21:05:00.000+01:00

I'll be going to the Essential Web event this Wednesday at the BFI IMAX.

There are going to be a bunch of interesting companies there, but I'm really interested to see some of the folks who have come along to Opencoffee presenting, including Loudervoice, Yuuguu, Parkatmyhouse.com, Wonga and Extate.com.

Good luck to all of these companies.

If you're going to the event, we're going to be talking a little bit about Seedcamp, so please say hello and hope to see you there :)

Moo and MindCandy in Businessweek

2007-06-25T13:04:00.000+01:00

There is a great cover piece in the latest BusinessWeek, which features Moo and Mindcandy, two innovative and edgy London companies in which TAG and Index were early investors.

Both are great examples are companies appealing and selling to a global audience based out a European city. The piece also talks about Joost based in Luxembourg and FON based in Madrid. Of course there are a legion of other European consumer Internet stars making waves worldwide like Netvibes, Bebo, Habbo, Stardoll, Last.fm and not forgetting Skype.

Its really exciting to see European companies making a global splash being recognized by mainstream US media - long may it continue.