In case you have not already read or even seen our other blog, IT PR, I recommend you take a look.

It focuses more - as you might expect - on news and public relation aspects using new media technologies.

The current blog post on “Web 2.0 monetizing” summarizes the latest discussions on this subject and Adrian - our man for this blog - has his own opinion of course too…

On Friday the CEO of startup Mahalo.com (and former GM at Netscape) wrote a blog that caused a lot of backlash in the US tech scene and found its culmination with Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington taking a shot at the topic too.

First of all, I must say that this discussion is a bit amusing here in old Europe. Guys, I am glad that you got so excited about the topic and now really seem to understand that VC money (even if plentiful still in the US) is not there to blow on big title hires, designer furniture or other perks. Having also lived in that Silicon Valley dream world from 1997 to 2001, I know that group of people who got together (I think on Tuesday’s ) discussing how they could find other cool startup idea buddies that got 5-10 million USD funding, all having more or less the same business model and all wasting their money with the same TV commercials to get their B2C online store up and running.

We all know that there was a market clearance happening, and a healthy one, I must say. The interesting thing is that there are still some guys out there that survived it somehow and are even now thinking that the only reason why they failed at the time was that their ideas were too early and NOW is once again the time to build the 20th or so Web 2.0 company in the exact same space - in which most IMHO (as we will soon see, too) will bite the dust.

As Google reminds us nicely, today is the birth date of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

What is in a name? We always thought that was not so important for us, but over time we got tired of people misreading what we are. So end of last year we decided to look for a new name for our company. As anyone who has been in this process knows quite well, it is not an easy task. Especially if it is your own company. We found some good names, but the web domain names were of course taken, and not having the .com, .net and other domains did not make sense for us we thought. So finally Adrian found one that we liked since it describes what we do, had all domain names still available and, last but not least, found approval from others we asked as well. After letting it sit there for about 4 weeks we still thought it is OK, so decided to do it.

From today on we are Extendance, and Nice Ventures, which was started back in 2001, ceases to exist. The name has served us well, but the time has come to move on.

I once (about 17 years ago or so) attended a speech by German stock market guru Andre Kostolany (1909-1999). So many years later, the only thing I still remember (apart from his self-confident appearance) was his analogy on how the stock markets and the real markets correlate. He said that one can compare both with a dog and his master going for a walk. The dog runs forward and backwards but the net forward or backward movement is the same as the master’s. The dog, he said, is the stock market and the master the real business market environment. I thought it was a nice comparison, although it has not made me a guru myself in stocks. Now, looking at last week’s tech stock market development, Kostolany’s comparison seems to be more true than ever. With one addition, I would say.
Changes in businesses are now reflected on the stock market instantly and literally in real-time, to use a technology phrase. If you look at how practically all tech stocks this week got either a boost or a knock down depending on their quarterly performance, this becomes evident. I guess the explanation is also more technical than anything else. The IT systems, internet information spread and also online trading for private people makes these super-fast movements possible. If a tech company announces great quarterly results, the info is spread instantly and institutional and private investors alike go online to sell or buy.
So what do we learn from that, other than that life and markets move fast? Let’s close with two quotes from Mr. Kostolany: “Wer viel Geld hat, kann spekulieren; wer wenig Geld hat, darf nicht spekulieren; wer kein Geld hat, muss spekulieren.” (Who has lots of money CAN speculate, who has little money CANNOT, who has no money MUST speculate”). And the other quote: “Aktien kaufen, Schlaftabletten schlucken und sich nach ein paar Jahren über einen hübschen Gewinn freuen.” (Buy shares, swallow sleeping pills and be happy about a nice gain in few years). The latter is probably still true as well, as long as we have a growing world market, which is the case thanks to China and others.

Gizmodo has spotted an interesting advert in New York. It has to be said that in this case I certainly agree with Nokia. Apple’s desire to keep the iPhone free of third party apps seems bizarre given the fact that Apple Macs were successful mostly because of third party apps, but there do seem to be some reasons why this is the case

Reason one is that Apple seems to want to retain an excessive amount of control over the iPhone - this may be related to the network exclusive deals it has inked with AT&T, O2 etc.

Reason two is more serious. Basically Apple’s iPhone runs (almost?) all applications as the root user, as has been noted at metasploit amongst other places. Running applications as root (Administrator for Windows users) is a big security no no because it means that if the application that runs is a malicious one then it has complete control over the phone. This is generally considered “A BAD THING”.

I suspect 3rd party apps will only become available once the iPhone code creates a number of lower authority users. This is likely to be a tricky task and so we may have to wait until v2.0 of the code.

Nokia, in this case, would seem to be a far more secure smartphone, because although it is open it doesn’t have this really nasty security feature (as far as I can tell anyway).

Update: Another potential PR spin for Nokia. The “Bricking” of unlocked iPhones. Nokia’s brick is a nice reliable (if expensive) piece of hardware not a software “upgrade” that kills your nice expensive hardware.

I was encouraged by some colleagues today to briefly blog about this experience. We needed to chat with someone in the Middle East on a project. Since that country is blocking Skype it was suggested we use Google Talk for chatting. So we did. We had only three people in the chat but were quite annoyed by the fact that Google Talk does not support multiple chatters. Only two people can chat with each other at a time. If you have three people only you can still manage of course - even if it is annoying - but more people would be impossible to do without unreasonable effort. In addition, the user interface was otherwise very poor and at times irritating. As one of my colleagues said: “yes that tool is really crap.” Only excuse they have is that it is in “beta” still…

If you need to hop from Zurich to London at short notice you don’t have to wait for Easyjet to come back (I think in October) but can simply use Air France, which operates at extremely low costs and offers a much better service than the low-frills, low customer service Easjet. Now on my last trip I found a nice gadget in the airline magazine. An electrical bicycle that seems the ideal vehicle if you live in a small to medium-sized city/town, don’t want to add to the pollution, but want to be fast. It seems like a great idea. You simply recharge from a normal electrical outlet and then obtain up to 25km/h speed and 30-45 km of traveling distance. Recharge time is 6-7hours, so overnight basically. Price is 790 EUR which seems reasonable as well. So in short I can see some good reasons for people to use it, particularly in central European cities and especially in the summer. In the US, distances are usually too big so I would think not an appropriate fit unless you live 5-15km or so away from your work place.

Francis Turner, one of my colleagues, pointed me to this website here: The Funded. It is a place where people can rank and comment on their experience with VCs. VCs themselves are typically extremely well connected and send each other business plans and other info on a daily basis. But what should young entrepreneurs do when they need to find out which VCs might be a good fit for them, and which ones they had better be careful with? That is one aspect of The Funded site, where a VC ranking and personal comments give some insights. I have not checked out the site in detail so I am not sure how good the info is, but I would think it is at least a place worth looking at when you are checking out VCs.