Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Bye bye SiliconBeat, Welcome VentureBeat

It is now official! Matt Marshall has removed the password of his new blog/site and has announced the launch of his own independent venture: VentureBeat. He will keep on covering the venture capital and startup world that he had covered with a lot of talent over the past few years - as a newly minted entrepreneur. I had lunch with Matt last Friday and he was both excited and nervous as he was putting the final touches of this launch. In his inaugural post on the site, Matt clarifies his motivation for going solo and some elements of his plans:

On Friday, I will serve my last day at the San Jose Mercury News and will no longer be blogging at SiliconBeat. VentureBeat has become my sole occupation and focus.

My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News’ Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.

To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley’s paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc’s mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I’m covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.

As I said in my comment on the “old” SiliconBeat: Smile Matt, you are now an entrepreneur like the startup guys that you have been covering. Congratulations for the move!.

Update: in irony, poor Matt is facing one of the worst nightmares of the startup CEO whose service is launching and ends up being taken down by traffic or bugs. VentureBeat.com has been down since this morning, and shows no sign of immediate recovery. I was with David Hornik this afternoon and he could help but chuckle “That's why people host their blogs on TypePad” - which is also going down sometimes, but that's another story.

Tags: siliconbeat, venturebeat

Experimenting with a few services on this blog

I have always tested a number of tools and services on this blog, to the point of sometimes making the page load time untolerably long (apologies for that - obviously not intended). One of the areas of experimentation is advertising, and you might have noticed sponsored links, banners, both on the blog and on the feed. My motivation is not to make money that way (I would not go very far with the amounts generated), but to figure out how mainstream consumer advertising programs "work" on social media content. The last one - that replaced AdSense - is , Amazon's new advertising program called Omacaze Links. Initial results aren’t too convincing yet – but we’ll see how that automatic contextual matching combined with behavioral targeting performs. To date, I have received the best results from the FeedBurner advertising network inserting ads in my feeds.

I have also added a pretty cool community building feature called MyBlogLog. My friend Brad Feld has been using the service for a long time, and like him I enjoyed analytics that MBL provide daily about your “clicks-out”. Then MyBlogLog has added this automatic creation of reader communities, which I find interesting – any user of MyBlogLog accessing my blog more than a few times is automatically added to my reader community. And it just takes a few minutes to configure the tool and add a piece of JavaScript to your template to get this list of faces having most recently accessed the blog. Last weeek, Eric Marcoullier, MBL’s founding CEO (who has since left the reins of the company to Scott Rafer), has enabled a cool hack: the addition of pictures from readers leaving comments. This feature is very familiar to Flickr or any service that requires a login to leave a comment - but MBL can add this feature to blog running on TypePad or Wordpress. Sort of adding a personal touch to faceless blogging… Note that images are added once the page is fully loaded and therefore it can take a bit of time. Check out MBL's blog here.

And this is post #500. I know that some blogs get there in a few weeks but it took me a couple of years.

Busy on the conference circuit - again

Courtesy of Upcoming.org, here is a quick subset of the events I am going to attend or speak at in the next 60 days. I will increasingly make bulk announcements regarding events (except for the Search SIG which is about to hold its first event in a while on Sept 12th), otherwise I would spend even more time blogging about these things than I already do (just check my tag cloud on the right hand-side of my blog, it is telling).

• I have been invited to participate to the Bloggers Corner of SAP TechEd, the SAP developers conference taking place in Las Vegas during the week of Sept 12th. That week is pretty crazy so I will unfortunately be spending just the first couple of days over there. I am however pretty excited to chat with SAP executives about Enterprise 2.0 and its implications on the SAP core business (and I don’t expect a “WTF would I care” ?). Thanks to Jeff Nolan for inviting me to join the Blogger Corps that covered Sapphire last May.
• Straight back from Las Vegas, I will hang out on the 13th and 14th at the Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. Ryan Carson has been kind enough to reach out and invite me to attend this conference that I heard a lot of good things about. There is a great roster of speakers, and I look forward to the session and related lobbyconing – as usual. Oh, and it is amazingly good value ($295 for 2 days).
• It would be too simple not to overlay yet another event, so I will be moderating an HBS Tech panel on Blogs, Wikis & Social Media - Are 'Naked Conversations' a Business Communication Revolution? The event will take place on Sept 14th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, starting at 6pm. Speakers will be a few utterly unknown bloggers like SAP’s Jeff Nolan, Microsoft PodTech’s Robert Scoble, and a couple of others. As I am now used to, I plan to moderate this session un-panel style, so we’ll have a conversation “at large” with the audience. Thanks to Eric Moyer for inviting me.
• If you are interested in what happened to (2 year) old Web 2.0 companies once they have “graduated”, check out the Momemtum and Growth Conference that the IBD Network is putting together. The notion is to have CEOs from companies that have presented at an Under the Radar event in the past to come back and talk about growing, scaling, being successful or failing (?). That event is on Sept 27th and 28th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
• My friend Ismael Ghalimi is organizing the inaugural edition of the Office 2.0 Conference, which will take place on Oct 11th and 12th in San Francisco. Ismael is the CEO of Open Source BPMS company Intalio (Disclaimer: an 5–year old angel investment of mine) and the editor of the very popular IT Redux blog. The goal of the conference is to explore the landscape of the next generation of office applications that will reside somewhere in the cloud, all relying on your personal shelf space – which will also be in the cloud. A very interesting topic, especially after the annoucement of the forthcoming Google Office suite, and a great list of speakers. Note that you have two more days to get the earlybird price of $395. On Sept 1st, it goes up to $595.
• The Enterprise Software Investment Forum 2006 will take place on Oct 25 and 26th in San Jose, brings together Enterprise Software Investors, VCs, Strategists, and Entrepreneurs to discuss the evolution of the software market and its impact on venture capital and private equity investment strategies (and vice versa). It will be my first appearance at that conference that should also lead to interesting discussions.
• And there will be “the” Web 2.0 Conference – a registered service mark of O’Reilly, CMP Media and whoever alledgedly and reportedly claimed it . Update: Tim O'Reilly just blogged about the fact that CMP had agreed to restrain their attack dogs limit their enforcement efforts. Good thing when you recall the Web 2.0/IT@Cork brouhaha.
  That edition should be over the top, considering all that has happened over the past six to twelve months.

Phew. And I am sure I have forgotten a few. Feel free to point them to me (but he, not too many please) and as usual, happy to meet at any of these events - just email me at jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.

Trends in Venture Financing - 2Q06 Data

The 2Q06 compilation produced by Fenwick and West regarding vc financing trends in Silcon Valley has just been released, and it continues to show strength in activity and valuation. The most notable point, which needs to be confirmed in the next couple of quarters to really be meaningful, is that valuations have grown by a lower factor than in Q106 and Q405. Other data points listed in the report (statistics are provided by Dow Jones VentureOne):

• The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Barometer™ showed a 34% average price increase for Silicon Valley companies receiving venture capital in 2Q06 compared to such companies’ previous financing round. Although this was a significant increase, it was less of an increase than in the prior four quarters.
• The amount invested by venture capitalists in the U.S. in 2Q06 was approximately $6.7 billion, an increase over $6.4 billion in 2Q05 and $6.2 billion in 1Q06. The combined total of $12.9 billion for the first half of 2006 puts the
• The industry on pace for its largest investing year since 2001. We seem to be on track for a $25B to $28B total invested capital this year. Acquisitions of venture backed companies in the U.S. in 2Q06 was approximately $7.1 billion in 92 transactions. This was a decline from $8.5 billion/97 transactions and $8.4 billion/103 transactions in 2Q05 and 1Q06, respectively, although the combined total of $15.5 billion/195 transactions for the first half of 2006 puts the industry on pace for its best acquisitions year since 2000.
• There were 16 IPOs of venture backed companies in the U.S. in 2Q06, of which 10 were health care companies. These IPOs raised $1.3 billion. This was an improvement over 13 IPOs raising $.6 billion in 1Q06 and the combined total of 29 IPOs raising $1.9 billion in the first half of 2006 puts the industry on pace to have its best IPO year since 2000, other than 2004 when 67 IPOs raised $5 billion.
• Just to add an additional perspective, VC funds have raised close to $12B in 2Q06 (and about $18B since the beginning of year), according to the Merc. Two funds (Oak and NEA) have raised about $2.5B each, which tends to skew the numbers, but still, it is a lot of capital to deploy in a market that sees companies building much more efficiently.

These statistics cover a large spectrum of deals, from seed to very late stage. What I can say on the early stage is that 1) there is a lot of activity - both in terms of startups looking for financing, and 2) financing rounds actually closing. I will try and dig more quantitative info for that sector (any pointer would be appreciated).

The revolution of the blog peasants - or who gives a hoot about the A-listers anyway ?

I am not too fond of blogging about blogging, but I could not help noticing (courtesy of this TechMeme’s thread) that Nick Carr was ranting The Great Unread, in which he complains how tough it is for the loneliness of the mundane blogger (the blog peasants, that’s us) and how they struggle to get attention from A-listers (aka the blogging elite – them). That part of Nick’s piece made me smile (I was attending the conference he is referring to):

The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogosphere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant's little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal's hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

Given the growth of the blogosphere, I am not even sure about who A-listers are and what they represent anyway. The original A-listers from 2 years ago (when I started blogging) are largely gone (“sent to the guillotine” ), and it has been a long time since I removed almost all of them from my blogroll, and replace them by people who are meaningful to me. Tools like Technorati, TechMeme, Digg, Wikio, del.icio.us, Google define the new A-list on a much more granular basis – and that’s how it should be.

IMHO good content will find its way to rise to the attention of the people who are meant to be interested in it.

Congratulations to Netvibes on their $15M raise

I am late to it (been busy with the aftermath of my own news) but I have to congratulate my friends Tariq Krim, Pierre Chappaz and Freddy Mini for closing Netvibes’ Series B of 12M EUR (or $15M). Per TechCrunch:

NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Existing investor Index Ventures joined new investor Accel to lead the investment, which is one of the largest this year for a European company. The valuation was not disclosed.

I missed the angel financing round that involved Index Ventures, Pierre, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky but Tariq has since asked me to join his advisory board. The growth of Netvibes in users and traffic has been stunning, and I am delighted to be involved in helping build the company.

Actually, Freddy – the COO and future expat in the Valley to build the co’s business in the US –  is going to attend the forthcoming TechCrunch party this Friday. Feel free to look him up and say hi if you want to chat with a Netviber. Or send me an email and I will introduce you to Freddy. Just to make it easy, a picture of Freddy is on the right of this post.

Don’t look for me at TechCrunch VII. Unfortunately (well not that unfortunate), I will still be on hols for a few days when it takes place. Have fun, you all 700+ lucky bastards attendees.

Palo Alto bloggers featured in Palo Alto Weekly

Thanks to Cyrus Hedayati for interviewing me last week about bloggers living in Palo Alto: Living in a bloggers' world. The article also makes a reference to my good friend David Hornik (not Hornick) who has inspired a generation of VC bloggers with VentureBlog.

Pamela Hornik’s Silicon Valley Mom's Blog and  Enoch Choi’s MedMusings are also mentioned. Enoch actually helped me find the PA Weekly article through his post.

Is that the definition of being "mainstream" for a blogger. Being mentioned in your local community newspaper ? Or is it too much self-referencing ?

Oh, about the anecdote: it is actually a true story - except that the entrepreneur just wanted to introduce herself, not pitch me on her business... yet.

AOL acquires Userplane to expand AIM network

A brief interruption of my holiday schedule to announce a great news: portfolio co Userplane has been acquired by AOL LLC a couple of weeks ago, and I just heard that the official press release is now up there. I started working with the three founders of the company, Mike Jones, Nate Thelen and Jave Hall, over a year ago, and it is really with delight that I am congratulating them, and the whole team, for such a great outcome (that I will not give any detail about, as AOL has elected not to disclose any financial information about the deal). So let’s just say: a great outcome for all involved.

Userplane is in the business of powering online communities with a suite of communication tools: Instant Messaging, Chat rooms, A/V Recorder – on a white label basis. The original model was to license these tools to very large social networking and dating sites (MySpace, Friendster, Date.com,…), to which a free ad-supported version was added in June 2005. Now, about 120,000 communities use this suite of zero-install, zero-download communication products reaching millions of users in 25+ countries. The ad-supported version recently broke the billion monthly ad impressions, adding meaningful revenues to the bottom line of the company which had been profitable for a long time. A lot has happened indeed since that initial TechCrunch profile.

Userplane is joining the AIM group, inside the AOL Audience Business Unit, and will be overseen by Marcien Jenckes – the head of the AIM team, and Tina Sharkey – who runs IM and Social Media at AOL. Tina and Marcien are both based on the East Coast, but the whole team of 12 – and the 6 or 7 additional resources they will need to hire in the short term to build the business to a new scale, will remain in Los Angeles.

Ever since I met Mike Jones at BlogOn 2004, Userplane’s founders had earned my respect for having built a sustainable business purely on cashflows, without ever taking outside investment capital. They had been approached numerous times by potential acquirers and VCs, and decided to stay the course until the right offer came: a great termsheet, from the right firm, a Tier 1 VC from Sand Hill Road that could really help the business grow. But it just so happens that someone “high up” at AOL had decided that Userplane was a strategic asset, and pushed for an acquisition to happen swiftly. This was a very smart move.

It is always a moment of mixed feeling to have one of your companies acquired. On one side, it is a tremendous achievement for the team, and the just reward for the hard work the founders have put in over the past 5 years. On the other hand, I really had a blast working with these guys – and there is always the question of what (and how much ) could have been achieved by building the company further. I am however really happy for my friends Mike, Nate and Jave - and have to thank Marcien, Tina, Tom, John U, Christine, Stephen, Laura, Mark, Jorge, Jim and Jon – and all the AOL people I have not mentioned – for all their efforts in making this happen. As I said – a very smart move.

Web 2.0 around the world

Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 has put together a map of Web 2.0 startups from around the world. I suggested a couple of French companies I am involved in, Wikio (investor) and Netvibes (advisor). Interesting story as well.

Tags: wikio, netvibes

Testing the TypePad Mobile application

Written on the phone:

Six Apart’s Michael Sippey has announced tonight the release of a new product, TypePad Mobile, a mobile application that allows smartphone users to post pictures and (basic) blog entries from their phone. This was already feasible by email but the application - running on my Cingular 8125 on which I type this - does provide a slightly better user experience and control.

The installation was pretty straightforward when downloading the CAB file on the phone (note that it should be signed). The download on the PC did not add it to the list of applications to be installed by ActiveSync and no explanation was provided as to how it should be done. The text editor does not react exactly like Word or the mail program, like automatically capitalizing the first letter of a word after the end of a sentence, which makes it a bit bizarre to use. There is no concept of links, or tags, which means that mobile posts have to be updated from a computer after the initial publication, which I guess is fine for now.

Pictures can be automatically resized to 640px in width. I would have liked to see this option to be offered per post rather than a preference of the application.

Added on a PC:

It seems to me that blog posts that include a picture should have a choice of layouts like Buzznet or Flickr have. The current default is to display the picture on top of the post, and then insert the text that has been typed. There is also a slight issue when a user has a large number of blogs and photo galleries, only the first few ones can be accessed via TypePad Mobile.

According to Sippey, TypePad Mobile is the relaunched version of SplashBlog after its acquisition by Six Apart.