Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Quick LinkedIn update

LinkedIn has quietly been releasing a number of very useful features over the past few months, and I thought I would point them out as I find them really useful:

• Public profile: you can now expose elements of your LinkedIn profile - which is only feasible to people in your network - to all users. Your Public profile URL is http://linkedin.com/in/ACCOUNT_NAME (here is mine). And LinkedIn makes badges available too.
• You can now list your blogs and web sites in said profile.
• A feature I have been asking for 2+ years: you can now see the people who have recently joined LinkedIn in your rollodex - allowing you to decide who to invite more efficiently.
• For users of the Outlook toolbar, the Dashboard functionality gives you a list of people you could add to your address book (because you exchanged an email with them), people who are already on LinkedIn you could connect to, and most interestingly people in your rollodex whose contacts have changed.
• In the same toolbar Grab allows you to select someone signature block, and automatically extract signature fields to easily create a new address book record. As this is something that I do multiple times a day, this is proving quite useful - even if results are not 100% perfect.

Finally, and this is a fantastic achievement, LinkedIn is now profitable as announced by CEO (and good friend) Reid Hoffman in the second edition of TalkCrunch: Social Networks 3.0.

Disclaimer: I have no economic interest in LinkedIn.

Tags: linkedin

Web2Ireland: Web 2.0 - Key factors for success

I want to thank Enterprise Ireland for having invited me to present at their Web 2.0 conference. It was both great fun and very interesting to meet Irish entrepreneurs and chat about their ideas and challenges. This first post just links to the presentation I made, which focused on some of the key criteria for success for Web 2.0 applications. As I mention in the disclaimer, there is *no* silver bullet so don't use this as a rule book. I will follow-up with another post when I get back home (I am about to board my CDG/SFO flight).

Click here or on the bitmap below to download the presentation (PDF Format).

Tags: web2ireland, web20

Viacom's on the move: picks up Xfire for $102M

Xfire, a company that has developed a rich community for online gamers, has just been acquired by Viacom for a $102M in cash. XFire had 4M registered members, 1M active users, and an ad-supported business model. Out of the press release:

The acquisition brings Viacom and its MTV Networks unit the premier community that connects online gamers. Xfire and its users fit squarely into the Company’s multiplatform strategy to build an engaging universe of music, gaming, entertainment, news, networking and interactivity for focused audiences. As part of MTV Networks, Xfire will be better able to maximize its advertising revenues through more aggressive marketing, greater global penetration and comprehensive integration with the Company’s other digital and cable properties that address the gaming demographic.

Launched in 2004, Xfire has four million registered members who use its software. Its one million active users average 91 hours per month, with an average session length of over three hours. The robust, ad-supported Xfire application supports hundreds of the latest PC games and provides social networking, instant messaging and information for online gamers. In addition, the Xfire application provides traffic to its popular website, featuring forums and gaming downloads.

Xfire had received between $10M and $20M (?) in funding from DFJ, NEA and Granite Global Venture (Series C of $5M in 2004, Series D of $5M in 2005) plus several million dollars in their Series A & B (which I could not find exact information about) when they were still called Ultimate Arena. Xfire was actually featured this month in the DFJ newsletter (scroll down).

This exit is providing useful data points for our team at Userplane (Disclaimer: one of the companies I am involved in), that now supports over 100,000 communities with its Flash-based IM and chat room service - including MySpace, Friendster and most brands in the online dating world. Already profitable, and without any VC funding, the company has found ways (i.e revenues) to grow organically into supporting millions of users. Esther Dyson recently met with CEO Mike Jones and has a nice write-up on her Flickr blog.

Tags: userplane, xfire

Can we all use the same micro-formats please ?

I live-blogged the launch of the Structured Blogging initiative during the Syndicate conference in San Francisco, and I could not help noticing that not everyone seemed in its favor. Edgeio (Usual disclaimer: I am advisor, investor and landlord to the company) through co-founder Mike Arrington had pledged support to Structured Blogging and Micro-formats.

Google recently introduced a set of protocols for GoogleBase - GData, and unfortunately these RSS/Atom extensions don't seem to be aligned with already established micro-formats. Richard Mc Manus raised the matter last week, and Edgeio's Matt Kaufman has a good post on the issue, which will hopefully be solved quickly.

Tags: edgeio, microformats, structuredblogging

EgoSurf: EgoSurfing without the guilt - they say...

Bloggers beware! Here is a new measurement tool - EgoSurf - for egotistical blogger (i.e anyone clicking on this link to run the tool on his/her blog :-P). As explained in the FAQ, the system runs a set of searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN and del.icio.us, and then tells you if you are out of control or not according to a secret formula of theirs.

Though I am not too sure what it means, it sounds like that I am in the red on Google and del.icio.us... And according to the system, I am “So-so” (WTF) and have the fifth biggest ego. Doh!

C'mon A-listers, please get me out of the Top 10!

PS: Note that the Technorati search produces zero results.

[via Pierre Chappaz - in French]

Tags: egosurf

The NY Times on MySpace's economics and challenges

I came across this New-York Times article about MySpace, its economics and challenges: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher (sub req'd). It is full of interesting data points, and is especially interesting in the light of the growing importance MySpace has in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Not only is MySpace the second largest Internet web site in page served, it has also become a common launchpad for new startups that offer widgets that can be integrated in users' home pages. Bambi Francisco had a good piece on this “trick” two weeks ago: MySpacenomics (sub req'd).

Interesting snippets:

• MySpace now has over 70 million signed users (but the article does not mention how many users are actually active - logging at least once in the last 90 days).
• As mentioned, only Yahoo serves more pages than MySpace which is getting close to one billion pages per day.
• The yearly revenue of MySpace is pegged at $200M, with an average CPM of 10 cents – which is very low. Yahoo’s revenue is about 20 times MySpace’s – based on a more efficient monetization of their traffic (and a suite of subscription-based services).
• MySpace has so much page views to monetize that even the largest advertising networks cannot/do not want to deal with the inventory. The following tidbit is telling:

A sign of that challenge is seen in Mr. Levinsohn's effort to expand the use of text ads — the rapidly growing format pioneered by search engines. He has been running tests with Yahoo, Google and several smaller ad providers and has sought proposals from them for longer-term deals.
The answer he received was a shock. Not one of them, not even the mighty Google, was sure that it could provide enough advertisements to fill all the pages that MySpace displays each day, Mr. Levinsohn said. The search companies did not want to dilute their networks with so many ads for MySpace users, whom they said were not the best prospects for most marketing because they use MySpace for socializing, not buying.

• Not surprisingly, MySpace is going to try and integrate advertisers and sponsors in the site, and build more precise profiles of its user so that given sub-demographics can be targeted more effectively.
• A marketplace or classifieds of some sort will eventually be developed.

NewsCorp is not only counting on MySpace in their Internet strategy:

Indeed, rather than squeeze all its Internet ambitions into MySpace, Fox Interactive is assembling a network of Web sites, including IGN, a collection of sites focused on video games, and Scout, which runs Web sites for about 200 local sports teams. The News Corporation is also developing a portal devoted to entertainment, drawing from its Fox network programs, the Page Six gossip column of The New York Post and show-business reporters at the 35 local television stations it owns, Mr. Levinsohn said.

Lots of comments on the article, which is currently on top of Memeorandum.

Tags: myspace

UltraDNS acquired by Neustar for $62M

The news just hit the wire: Managed DNS service provider UltraDNS has been acquired by Neustar for a total consideration approaching $62M in cash.

The fund I was a GP of, the Reuters Greenhouse Fund, invested in UltraDNS back in 2000, leading a $25M series B (at a 2000-style valuation - those were the days). The vision was the right one: the DNS is such a fundamental piece of the Internet infrastructure that there is a genuine business in providing a more secure and reliable service than the standard (Bind) implementation. The execution however was *a lot* harder than originally anticipated, and it took a lot of hard work and difficult decisions to get the company to grow profitably its business, and get to this exit. I sat on the board for almost four years, and enjoyed working through all the ups and downs of the company with CEO Ben Petro, CTO Rodney Joffe, fellow board member VantagePoint Venture Partners' Eric Ver Ploeg and the rest of the team.

Congratulations to them and to my former Partner, Martin Stapleton (who took over my board seat) for growing the business and reaching this positive outcome.

Tags: ultradns

Introducing my French blog: “Sans Accent”

In an insane move on my part (as if I had plenty of free time), I have started a new blog in French “Sans Accent”. As I explain in my first post, the idea has been on my mind for a while. That blog will have a broader scope than Software Only, and will deal with topics related to France and/or the French community - including politics and general rants about what is happening (or not happening) “over there”.

Sans Accent means “without accent”, and refers to the fact that whilst I will make an effort to write in French, I won't bother with putting accents on vowels (which I don't have on my Qwerty keyboards anyway).

The feed for that blog is here.

Speaking in Paris and Dublin next week

I'll spend most of next week in France, with a quick one day trip to Ireland. Quite a busy agenda as you can see:

• On Tuesday night - almost upon arrival, I will participate to a talk show on technology innovation: Generation Europe1 (Europe1 is one of France's national radios). I will point to the podcast of the show once it is up.
• On Wednesday, I will do the opening keynote of Capital IT, a French IT innovation conference.
• On Thursday, I will be in Dublin to speak at the Irish Web 2.0 conference. I have suggested to my friend Fergus Burns, Nooked's CEO, to organize an entrepreneur/blogger dinner that day. Homie Marc Canter will also be there, so it can only be animated and full of fun conversations.
• On Friday, back to Paris for the now traditional French entrepreneur dinner: CGSDinner 4.0. Leave a comment on Marc's blog if you want to join the list of potential attendees.

Phew... What a week.

“Israeli VC on Sand Hill road” is her blog

And Tali Aben is her name.

I was very happy to see that my good friend Tali just joined the ranks of the VC bloggers, and be the first VC blogher in a long time - which is great. Tali is a General Partner at Gemini Israel Funds - a Tier 1 Isreali firm, and is based in Silicon Valley. You will no doubt find her experience of helping Israeli portfolio companies interesting, and her wit and frank style enjoyable.

As she puts it in her first post:

I suppose, there's a first time for everything.... and it's high time to get this blog started. I'll start by saying what it is I'll be blogging about:

* Issues facing Israeli startups
* Raising 3 boys (ages 2,8 and 12)
* Professional women
* Digital Photography

I suppose that will keep me busy for awhile..... stay tuned.

Welcome Tali. I hope that you will find the time to post every now and then in your busy agenda.

Tags: blogher