Healy Jones | 
11 30th, 2010| 
Carwoo has a smart post on how difficult it is to find qualified online marketing/sales gurus with hacking backgrounds.
Nov
23
The debate on the bubble rages on, but there is a small but interesting data point from Fenwick – a Silicon Valley startup law firm.
90% of all series B and beyond rounds tracked by Fenwick for INTERNET companies were up rounds – way more than the software category. Small data point, but that’s a big % above.
Nov
22
My ocassional co-blogger and OfficeDrop’s CEO has a good post on Small Business Trends with some tips on working with outsourced designers. Like many startups, we can not afford a full time designer, so make extensive use of outsourced designers to help us with everything from logo design to site design to button design. It is working well for us, and Prasad shares a number of good tips in his “5 tips for working with outsourced designers” article.
Nov
17
There are some posts going around on a recent conversation had between Fred Wilson and John Doerr where they debate how innovative Google and Facebook are.
Fred takes the point that Facebook and Google aren’t really innovating anymore, instead they are buying small companies and scaling their innovation. John disagrees, although supposedly was hard pressed to come up with concrete examples.
My opinion:
Scaling is innovation.
Just because we, as consumers, aren’t seeing the innovation doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The plumbing required to support the search volume on Google and the traffic volume on Facebook is amazing. And the growth both companies have experienced over the past 5 years is unprecedented. The engineers and sys admins at these two companies are experiencing problems + creating solutions no other company in the history of the internet has had to experience (OK, Twitter is probably getting some of this too).
A better question would be are either of these companies producing business model innovations. Since Google seems to like to give a lot of stuff away for free to get ad revenue, and I’m not really sure how Facebook will make $ other than advertising, I think this may be the bigger issue these two were actually debating.
Nov
16
Dan Primack at Fortune has a new piece on Union Square Ventures – the fund is out on the prowl for a new fund, and has a great IRR from their first fund. He links to data from a bit limited partner (investor in VC funds) and points out that the other great returns fund in the report is The Foundry Group.
What do these two funds have in common? Well, one key piece is that they both have great bloggers as investors.
So, my question is this a coincidence? Or is there a correlation between venture capitalists who have thoughtful and proflific blogs and good returns?
On the one hand, there is some data here to suggest that these good bloggers are also great investors. I”m sure they boost their visibility with their blogs, and thus their deal flow and overall sexiness as an investor.
On the other hand, a) they also both invest in early stage internet deals, and blogging really appeals to these types of businesses. b) And if the hype on a little bubble in the early stage internet investing world is true then their funds may be enjoying returns from focusing on this space, and thus the blogs may contribute nada. c) And as some of the earliest spotters of the “capital gap” they may be benefiting from the first mover advantage of supplying just the right amount of capital needed by internet companies these days d) And it is possible that people who are good bloggers may be somehow just smarter than average investors (i.e. the two skill sets are just correlated and not causal really).
I’d guess if blogging really helped investors then we’d see more life science VCs and more growth/PE funds blogging. So my thesis would be more that the two funds I just mentioned are doing well not because of blogging, but that blogging was a symptom of all the good things that enabled them to do well recently.
Nov
14
There is a cool post on TechCrunch by Ajay Kulkarni, Sensobi CEO/TechStars alumni, on cutting edge email applications. A few of these were founded/funded out of Boston, which is really great. Email is still a killer app, in my mind. I realize that younger people don’t use it as much as I did when I was in college, but still it is an everyday app that is a part of most workflows. Innovations, like the ones Ajay mentions in this article, are going to keep email’s utility high for the foreseeable future IMHO.
A few of the companies with Boston connections are:
Boomerang, which lets you schedule emails
Followup.cc, an email reminder service
Rapportive, which connects to social networks and give you info on the people you email (bonus points if you can guess the Boston connection.)
Nov
11
I was tipped off by BostInno that local company EqualApp won Future Forward’s GameChanger award last week. Congrats to the college admissions counseling startup!
Nov
10
Since I’ve been putting out a lot of stuff around the mobile OS landscape, I thought I should link to this great Gartner report with facts and figures on international phone sales and smartphone sales.
Check out this chart on smartphone sales in the third quarter 2010 by operating system:
Android is doing very well and the increase in marketshare is amazing. However, it doesn’t really look like the market share gain is coming from Apple – rather it looks like the old standbys, Symbian and RIM are the ones really losing share to me.
Gartner is also estimating that a huge percentage of Verizon’s smartphone sales are Android related – 75%! I wonder how that will change when the iPhone goes to Verizon…
Nov
4
A CNN piece alerted me to a Pew Research study on the penetration of checkin apps, and claimed that only 4% of people in the US have actually used a checkin app.
I’ve been thinking about checkin apps for a while, mainly because I’m slowly using Foursquare less and less as time goes by. I’m finding it slow (although I think my ancient iPhone is part of the problem), that it doesn’t really fit into my workflow (i.e. my friends and wife think it’s annoying that I always have to pull out my phone whenever I go into any store) and to be totally honest, am not getting enough utility out of it anymore.
I was worried that this study was going to only include landline phones, but they somehow included cell phone users in the study. (see my older piece on landlines vs. cellular congestion). So there could be some interesting data in the piece.
Here is some cool information from the survey:
24% of online adults use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others. Ten percent of these status update site users use a location-based service, over twice the rate of the general online population.
twitter penetration
The other chart I found interesting shows a funny barbell in terms of education – less educated and more educated people checking more often (note this is not statistically significant but I’ll pretend that it is.) And middle of the road income people checkin more than higher income people – but again, not stats significant and may be a function of the age – younger people also make less $ so this may be the cause.
% of people who checkin by demo
Anyways, cool research by the Pew people.
