Net

Golden Gate RunCast with Guest's

Yesterday Loic and I took our RunCast (or should I call it a FogCast?) to a new level: The Golden Gate RunCast featuring guests: Bill Tai, General Partner with Charles River Ventures (and on the Maxthon board) and Konstantin Othmer,CEO and founder of Coremobility. It was a great run on a bridge over troubled water and can bee seen as bridging the gab between Europe and the US ;)

Technorati Tags: billtai, goldengate, loiclemeur, coremobility, crv, storyboards

Off to San Francisco

I'm off to San Francisco July 24 - August 1 for some very interesting meetings. If you want to meet up in the bay area the coming days please leave a voice mail on (650) 492 52 59 alternatively get me on skype or Twitter...

Storyboarders - Now On Facebook

Since the feedback on my idea of using storyboards to develop business plans have been very positive, I decided to create a Facebook group dedicated to the topic. Enter Storyboarders. Drop your word-based business plans & burn those power points. Enter the storyboards! We are the storyboarders, creating conversations - not just presentations!  Feel free to join in & let's crowdsource it to the next level. Who knows, perhaps this group will give birth to a new business plan format better suited for humans including VCs?

Technorati Tags: businessplans, creativeprocess, crowdsourcing, Facebook, storyboards, tools

Join My Advisory Board on Facebook

Inspired by my friend Loic who started an advisory board on Facebook for Le Web 3, I wanted to expend that idea a bit. We all need good advise from time to time. Companies have their advisory boards - so why not extend that to the person? Please feel free to join my personal advisory board on Facebook.

Storyboards As A Business Plan

Since I have been sitting in on quite a few start-up pitches as well as continuously being pitched myself by all kind of ventures, I was thinking if it is not on time to change the current format for business plans. Let's face it most VC's don't even read them, not even the executive summary for that matter. Power point is more and more taking over although we are all sick and tired of them too - especially if they have more than five slides.

Since most businesses are like a developing story - wouldn't it be easier to use the storyboard as an example of visualizing you business plan? We all love stories, wether they are fiction or not , on TV or not, true or false. As a matter of fact, most good businesses have a good story to tell. Why not try to tell that story as you see it develop over time on a storyboard?

Using the storyboard as a format for describing a business forces you to reduce the crucial steps into single frames and let go of those long never ending paragraphs that nobody reads anyway. I personally use a lot of visual tools in my day to day businesses. My favorite so far is Mind Mapping wether on paper or as for the past four years, a software called MindManager. As a matter of fact, I went through all my University studies using mind maps, which some of them I still have left.

I think that story-boarding is very close to mind mapping, but helps you perhaps better to tell or develop a story. Going forward, I will start using storyboards for some ideas I am developing in parallel with mind mapping.

What then are my favorite tools? Well, except for paper and pen:

• MindManager
• Pages - comes with Mac's iLife (use the creative templates )
• MacJournal - not a visualization tool, but fantastic for note taking - especially the full-screen author with enable me to write with green letters against a totally black  background - putting all the distractions behind.

Finally there is Montage, which is a very interesting screenwriting software aimed at pro's - but an interesting option if you really would like to tell your story in a screenwriting format. What are your favorite tools?

Technorati Tags: businessplans, macjournal, mindjet, mindmapping, montage, startups, storyboard, storytelling, vc

What do you think?

Ever since I announced that I am stepping down from my active involvement in Maxthon, the stream of proposals and offers just keep coming. Although I did expect some positive reactions I never anticipated the amount of positive reactions. I now really need to carefully think about what my next move should be and what kind of venture/s I would like to get involved in.

Since I know that my blog readers are extremely intelligent, wise and really wise people, I have decided to crowdsource for some inspiration. Currently a number of options are open:

• Join the VC world
• Top position in a very well known public company
• Join a start-up
• Combine a number of ventures under my Mashup Media company
• Start something completely new
• Just take a very long vacation and think about it

What do you think?

For those of you located in the Bay area, I will be over again July 24 - Aug 1st and as always I love to meet up with fellow entrepreneurs and share experiences,  so if you want to meet up, please leave a comment or contact me directly on you know what...;)

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, Maxthon, netaneljacobsson, crowdsourcing, VC, venturecapital

Loic's & my Run & PoolCast From Spain

 

Loic's and my first RunCast together finishing of with a PoolCast filmed at a secret location in north Spain.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, netaneljacobsson

Virtual Goods Summit 2007 Videos Up

Here's two video's from the Virtual Goods Summit in Stanford last month. The first: Virtual Items - mainstream or not? Featuring: Jia Shen, James Hong, Robert Scoble, J.T. Stephens and John Vars.

The second video: "Making Virtual Economies Work" focused on what it takes to build, launch, and maintain a successful virtual economy. Featuring: Mark, Joshua, Brock, Raph, and John.

Technorati Tags: vgsummit, vgsummit2007

Stepping Down From Maxthon

Dear friends,

I have decided to step down as Senior Vice President & Partner and reduce my active involvement in Maxthon in order to pursue new exciting challenges.
Maxthon has been my main client & more than full time partner for over two years now and gone from 21 million to almost 100 million downloads during this period.

Now that the big strategic deal with Google done, the company is established as a respected browser alternative, I feel that the right time has come for me to move on and get involved in new and exciting ventures.

As a share holder I will continue to support and follow Maxthon’s continued success however, my day to day involvement in the company will stop. For high-level deals you can still reach out to me but for the rest please turn to: business (at) maxthon.

To wrap up, I want to thank you all for these two great years and wish the Maxthon team all the best.

As for future ventures & adventures, stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Browsers, China, Google, Mashupmedia, Maxthon, netaneljacobsson, Software

iDrink06 - The Comic

I had a really good time yesterday hanging out with fellow israeli entrepreneurs and VC's at Herzeliya beach yesterday evening. To my surprise was Om Malik and Andrew Barton (Rocketboom) who I recently spend a few days with at the CRV summit in Phoenix there too. Great vibes, beers and cigars. Networking Israeli style. This is how I really would arrange a conference - By the beach, informal, no stage, no power point,drinks, cigars and cool music. Kudos to my buddy Ouriel and Sagi, Orly and Eyal for arranging it all.

Technorati Tags: idrink, idrink06, Israel

Skitch - My New Favorite Snap-Draw & Share Application

I just love Skitch. I have 5 invites if you want one. Just one thing: it's Mac only.

Technorati Tags: Skitch

Frets On Fire - Open Source Guitar Hero

This is just awesome! Frets on Fire is a game about musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible. It's an open-source project with hundreds of songs composed by the community and supports multi platform. In short it is open source guitar hero! How cool is that!

Features: 

• Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
• Song editor  form making your own tunes
• Compete iwth others on the World Charts
• Supports importing Guitar Hero I-II songs
• Multiplatform
• Open source

Technorati Tags: fretsonfire, games, opensource, guitar hero, music

MX Play - 3D Audio Mashups

Last week I meet with Ruper Dolasia CEO and Marcy Keenan, VP Business development of MX Play - a new and very cool music player based in San Francisco. At first I asked myself, who needs another music player? But MX Play is different from other players out there in that they have really emphazised on the audio quality. The founders have a strong background in working with audio codex and technologies - and you can hear that.

MX Play makes you music come alive with 3D audio. For serious music lovers this is music to your ears. But there's more to it than that. MX Play even lets you mash your own music with videos from YouTube and let's you discover new music as well.

• Mash your music with videos in the 3D AudioSpace
• Organize and import  your music from anywhere
• Browse the web in MX Play and discover new music

Technorati Tags: mxplay, mxplay, music, audio, mashup

Are Virtual Goods the Next Big Business Model?

Last week I attended the First Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University, organized by CRV's Susan Wu and Charles Hudson
and reported about it here. On the panel "Are virtual goods the next big business model?" I realized that I this really might be the case. 

Accel's, Kevin Efrussy who invested in Facebook, got a lot of question about Facebook's introduction of virtual gifts. Kevin said that if he who is a pretty boring non-cool person with pictures of his kids on his profile got gifts that people have paid $ for - then imagine what people (read attractive girls) who are cool & in receives! 

Susan Wu also reported that prior to the panel she got a virtual pizza thrown in here face by somebody she didn't even knew. And this person paid for that. How weird is that? Although virtual goods is extremely popular in Asia and a huge revenue generator the uptake in the US and Europe has been very slow. Enter Facbook. Min Kim from Nexon, added that Facebooks introduction of virtual goods is paving the way for a general acceptance of virtual goods outside of China, and in particular in the US. Judging from the popularity of virtual goods on Facebook - he just might be right.

But why on earth are people buying bikini's to their girlfriends avatar or virtual flowers that dies after two weeks?

According to Doppelganger's Tim Steven, its a real expression of affection, identity and emotion. People really feel just as proud wearing a pair of branded jeans in a virtual world as in real life walking across the school yard. It's the expression of the same thing. Moderating the panel Susan Wu, clearly stated that she would invest in a company selling virtual goods on Facebook! We have just got used to all the applications being launched on Facebook by companies hoping to gain distribution like a Trojan horse, now be prepared for the same companies getting ready to sell virtual bikinis, pizzas and why on iPhones to make some money too.

So are virtual goods the next big business model? Probably. If Habbo hotel make 90% of their revenues on virtual goods, they sell more furniture than IKEA and girls in Korea spends more money on their virtual haircut than on their real - there must be something in it...

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Nexon, vgsummit, virtual goods, virtual worlds

Outsourcing My Life # 5

Here's a new episode of outsourcing my life. New experiment: To outsource the building of a new business. Comments welcome!

Technorati Tags: outsourcing timferris 4hourworkweek