Scott Heiferman notified the Meetup community today that eBay has invested in a new round of funding at Meetup, alongside Allen and Co, Omidyar Network, Esther Dyson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Senator Bill Bradley. Business Week broke the story.
Meetup is one of my favorite companies. I was (am) a member of the NY Tech Meetup, which I’ve taken as a model for the Istanbul NEG.
Congratulations, Scott.
Nick Carr has commented on the new subscription pricing on iTunes. I am watching keenly as digital media distribution models mature. I do not yet have a call on how the audio and video distribution and pricing will evolve, but I do believe that most experiments today have their roots in the analog world that we all grew up in: records, radio and TV. I suspect that there will be a significant (albeit slow) change in the consumer behavior and, when the dust settles, the models we’ll see will have to take into account the inherent characteristics of digital media:
I have recently discovered the Visual Complexity website. Generally, art that excites me the most is driven by complexity and attempts to represent and communicate it. At the 9th Istanbul Biennial last year, the most impressive work for me was in this area, by Axel John Wieder and Jesko Fezer.
Exploring the site is a lot of fun.
Via CoolHunting.
I am not a finance expert. My venture capital activities are really the first time I am operating in the financial field. However, a good deal of my friends have gone into finance (mostly investment banking) after school, and a good percentage of those are now on the less traditional side of finance now; namely, at hedge funds.
As a result, I hear quite a bit about hedge fund performance claims. Among friends, there has been long standing discussion about how if each of these claims are true and accurate, then either these guys are smarter and richer than anyone else we know, or some of these number are inflated.
Well, just came across this article discussing how the latter explanation may just be the reason.
This statement may be a little indulgent but my favorite Turkish artist is one of my best friends, Ali Kazma. Yesterday, I attended a screening of his latest project titled "Obstructions to the Second Law" at Dulcinea, in Istanbul (unfortunately a Flash site – click "sergi"; in Turkish). If you’re in Istanbul, I recommend seeing it. There are continuous screenings between 3 and 8pm, every day except Mondays, through March 24th.
At SelectMinds, we spent a lot of time thinking about stakeholder relationship management. Our specific challenge was getting companies to look at their alumni (former employees) as sources of diverse value, e.g. re-recruitment candidates, potential clients, etc. We knew that the concept could be applied to various stakeholder groups, and were frustrated at how closed-minded most companies were about looking at these stakeholders outside of their explicit context.
Today, reading the paper, I came across an article (in Turkish) that demonstrated one of the most brilliant examples of effective stakeholder relationship management. Escort Computer, a leading Turkish PC maker, is offering a 15% discount on all laptops desktop computers, to its shareholders. While I am sure there are details, such as how many shares one has to hold and how long, this hints at Escort’s perspective on its shareholders. Very impressive, especially in a market where investor relations is still a crude notion.
NY Times reported today that Alan Patricof is leaving Apax Partners to start a venture capital fund, named Greycroft Partners, focusing on digital media ventures. The key story here is this:
"When you get into larger companies, you get into financial engineering
and leveraging models. There is a market down
there at the smaller end that we shouldn’t ignore. If you happen to hit
it right, there can be an exponential growth factor."
I have shared my thoughts on Media2.0 and VC in this blog. In a later post I speculated that we’ll see:
…smaller, more specialized VC outfits. One example I can think of is Union Square Ventures.
Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham are experienced and reputable enough that
they could have raised a larger fund with broader ambitions, but I
think they recognize their competitive advantage well and will be more
effective in their current set up.
The creation of Greycroft Partners now gives a much stronger validation to this argument. Patricof could have raised any size fund he’d like, and he chose to stay small and focus on earlier stages.
There has been various discussions of the smaller VC model. One leg of the conversation was started by Stowe Boyd, where he distilled the advisory value offered by VC firms, and proposed separating it. Even thought there were those disagreeing with Stowe, I think the launch of Greycroft emphasizes the value of attention and soft value in the early stage investment model.
My friend Aycan Avci, in a discussion today, described how he’d like to consume music. It’s distinct from any of the available models today, which include:
What Aycan would like to see is the Netflix for Music model, where you have access to a set number of songs at a time, and you can consume that set in any manner you choose – on your portable player, PC, etc. He suggested that it could be as few as a 100 songs at a time that can reside in your possession. If you’d like to add a 101st song, you’d have to lose one of your existing 100.
Interesting. My question would be if this model would be in line with how music fans would like to consume music. After all, there has always been a video rental business, but never a CD or record rental business (as far as I know.) One usually watches a film once and has low utility from its subsequent consumption. Whereas, the same person typically buys music and consumes it many times.
Aycan’s example for a use of this model would be for a party – say a reggae party where the subscriber would download 100 reggae songs, play the playlist for an evening, and swap out for something else, perhaps keeping a few of her favorites for a few more weeks.
Fred Wilson posted about shortcomings of text search. The same issue’s been on my mind since finding out about Hakia about a year ago. Hakia is one of the few ventures into semantic search.
Fred gives the humorous example that his blog A VC is the third return when one searches for ‘allen iverson email’ in Google. In Hakia, the same search returns a different,and to my novice eye, a better set of links.
Now here’s the odd part. Being a semantic search tool, Hakia would like you to search using natural language. So, I did a search for ‘what is allen iverson’s email address?’. And guess what? The first return was Fred’s blog!! 🙂
So, Fred, maybe you are the correct source for AI’s email address.
BTW, I have had a few conversations with Dr. Riza Can Berkan, the co-founder and CEO of Hakia, and know that Hakia is going through an extensive proprietary indexing process. In fact, the Hakia website states that "Hakia’s evolution is 18% complete". So, it is probably not fair to pass any judgment on its current accuracy and effectiveness.
Istanbul NEG member Burak Fakioglu has a good suggestion:
There are these magnificent video’s of entrepreneurs, VCs, industry leaders, academics, guru’s etc talking or giving out presentations at universities like Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. I thought they would be a great resource for Istanbul NEG. Most of these videos are realmedia streams and could be viewed from the following sites:
Stanford Center for Professional Development
I will also post this to the Istanbul NEG Yahoo Group.
Cem Sertoglu 