Junto Boyz

HILLARY CONDI HO DOWN!

Funny flash short on Hillary and Condi fighting over who is a better presidential candidate.

CORPORATE BLOGGING & SOCIAL SOFTWARE SPACE HEATING UP... BUT CAN WEB 2.0 BE ADAPTED TO BUSINESSES?

It's been almost two years since I met Tony and he told me about his vision for GoingOn, and then he asked me to help build this company.  While I wasn't planning to do another startup for a few years, joining him was one of the best decisions I have made. It's been a fun ride so far and has been exciting to see the market develop and move faster than we ever foresaw.

One healthy sign of an early market is the number of competitors leaping into your space.  It's been interesting to watch over the past several months some of competition that has been popping up:

- Five Across, which use to be a private-label IM (instant message) client and had a blogging platform (Bubbler) targeting the SMB market, completely changed to become... a blogging and social networkng platform.  They position themselves as a "platform for social networking and communities."  It's interesting because over a year ago they approached us to partner with them.  I wonder where they got the idea for their revamped product and business model? Anyway, they recently signed a deal with the NHL, which was great for them and everyone in this space.

- Pluck, which use to be a RSS feed reader company, now primarily sells a blogging and social networking platform called SiteLife.  They have taken a good approach in focusing on newspapers and media companies.

- Crowd Factory is a recent entrant into our space.  One interesting note is that they promoted their product on our homepage/platform a month ago.  I don't know why since we don't have that much traffic nor have we marketed our site enough to deserve such attention :)

- Cerado is a CRM company who recently launched products (i.e. "Business Blogging" and "Social Networking for Businesses") in our space and like Crowd Factory promoted themselves on our platform :)

Then are there others such as iUpload and Kintera, and overlapping players such KickApps and MyBlogLog to name a few.

Unlike many consumer "Web 2.0" plays, this competitive environment is not made up of one-feature companies that hope to generate enought traffic and get sold. All these players are selling something of value to companies and generating revenue, so it makes it a much more exciting market than something like the online calendar space.

In recent news, ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe continues his "Enterprise 2.0" discussion with this post, "Can Web 2.0 be adapted to the enterprise?" Of course. And of course I'm using a broader definition of "enterprise" than Dion, but I believe any of the companies I listed above will say that the consumer "Web 2.0" movement will transform how companies operate, sell, market, and function behind their walls.  Omidyar Network's Christine Herron has some more information on this ("Web 2.0 Consumer Technology Hits the Enterprise") along with an overview of other applications and technologies reflective of this movement  she see saw at DEMOfall.

"ONLY A MORON WOULD BUY YOUTUBE"... GOTTA LOVE CUBAN

You gotta love Mark Cuban. In his latest public speech, he says only a moron would buy YouTube due to the potential lawsuits from copyright violations.  Also the latest report from comScore Media Metrix doesn't help YouTube's valuation and potential sale:

MySpace Leads in Number Of U.S. Video Streams Viewed Online, Capturing 20 Percent Market Share; Yahoo! Ranks #1 in Number of People Streaming

comScore Media Metrix, the leader in digital media measurement, today released an enhancement to its U.S. Video Metrix service, with the inclusion of Flash video content as part of the monthly rankings for streaming video sites.
.....
More than 106.5 million people, or about 3 out of every 5 U.S. Internet users, streamed or downloaded video during the month of July.  In total, nearly 7.2 billion videos were streamed or downloaded by U.S.
.....
Yahoo! Sites ranked as the top property by unique U.S. streamers with 37.9 million, followed very closely by MySpace, which attracted 37.4 million U.S. streamers.  Fast-rising YouTube ranked third with 30.5 million U.S. streamers, followed by the Time Warner Network (25.7 million U.S. streamers) and Microsoft Sites (16.2 U.S. million streamers).  (full press release)

I wonder what Mark Cuban would value Facebook at?

WE WEREN'T IN IRAQ WHEN THEY BOMBED THE WORLD TRADE CENTER OR 9/11

Admittedly, President Bush is not the most eloquent speaker, but he does get his point across in response to the liberals and liberal media blasting the airwaves with the recent report that supposedly concludes how the war in Iraq has fueled jihadism worldwide. Powerline has a video clip of Bush's response here and more information here.

WALLOP LAUNCHED... YEAH, I'M GOOD

Here's a bit of ego rubbing... rub, rub... rub, rub.  In my AlwaysOn column back in February 2005, I expressed how I thought Wallop should have been publicly launched to compete with MySpace and Friendster during the initial rush in 2004.  I wish Microsoft would have taken my advice sooner since it's a little late in the game, but Wallop has finally launched as a separate entity with Karl Jacob at its helm.  He's a serial entrepreneur who has built successful companies, so it will be interesting to see how Wallop grows and develops in the consumer social software space.

More from TechCrunch here, Mashable here, and CNET here.

"WEB 2.0 WINNERS AND LOSERS"

Wired's Michael Calore has his list of Web 2.0 winners and losers, but his piece seems a bit dated and boring. Flickr, Odeo (Odeo?), Writely, del.icio.us, and NetVibes are his winners.  Zzzzzzz....

His losers are MySpace, Squidoo, Browzar, Fo.rtuito.us, and Friendster. His description of Friendster seems to be his old notes from three years ago. Yes, it's boring but always of interest to read for you (us) tech geeks out there, especially since it's a short article.

"BORN IN THE USA, MAKING IT IN KOREA"... FINANCIAL TIMES ARTICLE MENTION

The Financial Times ran an article on my friend, Jimmy, and his current company, Innotive, today.  I blogged about Jimmy several times before, such as this post here.  We did two startups together and his current company was the one I was advising and helping out during my last nine months in Seoul. I asked him and Peter, our other co-founder from those two startups, to consider looking at Innotive, which they did and eventually took over the management. I'm still an advisor to this multimedia software company. Anyway, some good news will be announced soon for Innotive.

As for the article, I heard that the print edition had a full picture of Jimmy, so I'll probably go buy a copy tomorrow.  It's the lead story in their Business Life/Entrepreneurship section. Unfortunately, the reporter, who was kind enough to mention me, wrote that I was a "San Francisco-based technology consultant and blogger" so I didn't get a plug for GoingOn. It was months ago when I was interviewed by her, but I don't think she ever asked me what I was currently doing. Well, when we start becoming more active publicly in the coming months, I'm sure there will be more opportunties to plug GoingOn.

Anyway, since it takes a paid account to access the article online, I'm going to just post the whole thing.


Born in the USA, making it in Korea
By Anna Fifield
Published: September 20 2006 18:58 | Last updated: September 20 2006

In a grey room in a run-down building in southern Seoul, twentysomethings in T-shirts and flip-flops are tapping away furiously at their screens, an electric guitar propped up against one desk.

Here at the headquarters of Innotive, a software revolution is taking place. The engineers are working on a new kind of content integration and delivery programme that brings together all kinds of media – photos, video, text, hyperlinks and music – with the aim of ­challenging the might of Microsoft PowerPoint, the market leader in presentation software.

The company is also at the cutting edge of another revolution in South Korea: it is funded by a small group of private investors and is not linked to any of the chaebol conglomerates that dominate the country’s business environment.

Innotive’s software enables large volumes of data to be transferred and accessed quickly. It can handle many different types of content and many large files at the same time.

“PDFs, Flash Macromedia, 2D, 3D, animation, video, audio and hyperlinks – it can all be integrated into a single programme that can be accessed from computers, PDAs, mobile phones and set-top boxes,” enthuses Jimmy Kim, Innotive’s 35-year-old president.

Mr Kim demonstrates with a sales presentation used by Nissan Infiniti dealerships, which he describes as being “like Minority Report”, the futuristic Hollywood movie in which Tom Cruise’s character manipulates data on a transparent screen using a specialised gloves.

With the presentation appearing on a huge flat-screen television, Mr Kim taps the screen to change the colour of the car or to zoom in on its features. Tap again and it shows a video; once more and it brings up the list of specifications. Users can even draw on the screen and see their marks appear in the presentation.

In South Korea, customers include SK Telecom and Korea Telecom, and the Chosun Ilbo and Donga Ilbo newspapers. International clients include carmakers Hummer, Nissan and BMW, and broadcasters including TV Asahi and NHK in Japan, and CBS in the US.

The Innotive software application starts at $5,000 but the company also offers to design presentations for clients, for fees ranging from $2,500 to $150,000 per presentation depending complexity.

Together with six of his friends (also on the management team) Mr Kim owns 60 per cent of the company, while small shareholders own the rest. He expects Innotive to generate licensing revenues of $700,000 this year and has just raised $3m in two tranches from investors in Korea and the US.

The idea of using venture capital – not to mention entrepreneurship itself – is something of a foreign concept in Asia’s third largest economy. Mr Kim – who was born in the US, where his father worked at the space agency Nasa, moved to Korea when he was nine but returned to study biomedical engineering at Northwestern University – has certainly come up against many challenges in trying to combine the two concepts in Korea.

After working in corporate development and product planning at Trigem Computers – “I call it my MBA,” he says – he caught the entrepreneurship bug. “I was 26 but when you’re young and foolish you think two years is enough experience.”

With his friend Bernard Moon, another Korean- American, Mr Kim started a video-on-demand (VOD) cable television venture, deciding it was the next killer application.

“The hardest thing was getting our first start-up capital, but with my friends we raised $600,000 in 1997. We created it as a US company because it was easier to get funding – investors frowned on Korean companies that weren’t Samsung or Hyundai,” Mr Kim says.

But in Korea there was not – and still barely is – such a thing as venture capital, so potential investors always wanted to know how much of their own money they were putting in.

“In Silicon Valley, it was: ‘Give me your dreams and I’ll give you my money’. But in Korea people would say: ‘Give me your house and I’ll give you my money’,” Mr Kim says.

The Korean government is the biggest investor in ventures, contributing about 27 per cent of capital, followed by ordinary companies, VCs, pension funds and institutional investors, with half the money channelled into the information technology sector. VC funding hit Won2,000bn in 2000 but plummeted after the dotcom crash and amounted to only Won665bn (£375m) last year.

Mr Moon, who now advises technology companies, adds “cash is king” in Korea and other Asian countries. “In the US, venture capitalists say they don’t want to take more than 50 per cent in a company because it discourages ­entrepreneurship, but in Asia, investors look to take more than 50 per cent because they don’t value the intangibles,” he says.

Nevertheless, their VOD venture, called View Plus, got off to a good start, with moral support as well as financial backing from technology guru Masayoshi Son of Japan’s Softbank. But Softbank suggested that Mr Kim put View Plus to one side to set up the Korean operations of HeyAnita, a telecommunications company.

Then came the bursting of the dotcom bubble, which spelt the end of the cash for both ventures.

So Mr Kim took a day job as chief financial officer at Nexon, an online gaming company started by his college room-mate. At that time the company had revenues of $30m but it had hit $100m by the time Mr Kim left.

“I’m very, very restless and at that time I was also a board member of Innotive, which was very typical of small Korean companies: it had great technology but no access to sales and marketing expertise or the capital to grow,” he says. So Mr Kim embarked on a management buy-out.

Technology aside, Innotive has been helped by the fact that it occupies a niche where the chaebol do not operate and “where they can’t muscle in on our business,” says Mr Kim (see panel).

“That’s part of the reason why Korean online gaming companies have done so well, and why iRiver, the Korean MP3 maker, is struggling,” he says. “Our product doesn’t compete with the chaebols’ – it enhances it.”

Curbed by the conglomerates

South Korea’s corporate landscape has for decades been dominated by the family-run chaebol conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG, whose businesses span industries as diverse as shipbuilding, information technology, tourism, healthcare and autos.

But just as the chaebol were largely responsible for South Korea’s dramatic industrialisation, they are suffocating new businesses. Such is their strength that it is generally impossible for startups to compete. For instance, VK, a medium- sized mobile phone maker, went bankrupt in July.

“Regardless of whether a company makes a better mousetrap than the chaebol or not, it is very difficult for SMEs to compete,” says Hank Morris, a business adviser and 25-year veteran of the Korean market.

Many smaller companies are set up to supply chaebol companies, but this, too, leaves them at the mercy of big business. It is not uncommon for the conglomerates to follow agreements to raise workers’ salaries by 5 per cent with an insistence that suppliers cut their prices by 5 per cent.

But the chaebol’s insistence on allegiances also limits smaller companies’ options. “In Korea it’s very black and white. Are you with Samsung or Hyundai or LG?” says Jimmy Kim, president of Innotive. “If you have a relationship with one you can’t have one with another.”

The very existence of the chaebol discourages entrepreneurialism, says Bernard Moon, a San Francisco-based technology consultant and blogger.

“Even during the boom times, when the younger generation in Korea got a taste of entrepreneurialism, there was a hesitancy to leave the comfort of the Samsungs and the LGs.”

Entrepreneurship may now be blossoming but chaebol addiction could prove a harder habit to break.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

"QUIGO: THE NEXT GOOGLE?"

A good article in CNNMoney.com on one of GoingOn Network's technology partners, Quigo. They are powering the text-based ads within our platform. Some of our pages already have these in place and this will go system wide within the week.

Quigo: The next Google?
Privately held search firm Quigo is quietly winning business from Google and Yahoo!

You've heard of Google and Yahoo! But how about Quigo?

Quigo is not the household name that these other two search giants are. But the privately held company, which competes with Google (Charts) and Yahoo (Charts) in a key part of the online advertising business, is quietly becoming a bigger player.

Quigo sells a product called AdSonar to online publishers. AdSonar, like Google's AdSense and Yahoo's Content Match, combs through Web pages and serves up relevant ads based on the text on the page.

CNN.com and CNNMoney.com, for example, use Yahoo's Content Match on their sites and many other online media firms use either Content Match or AdSense. (Time Warner (Charts) owns CNN.com and CNNMoney.com.)

But a growing number of companies are beginning to favor AdSonar. In July, Cox Newspapers, which owns 17 daily newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Austin American-Statesman, said it would begin using AdSonar.

And earlier this month, Quigo scored a big victory when ESPN.com announced that it would begin using AdSonar this fall. The popular sports news site had been using Yahoo's Content Match. Other sites that use AdSonar are USAToday.com, News Corp.'s (Charts) FoxNews.com and MarthaStewart.com.

How is such a small company able to compete against the Internet's two established search titans? (full article)

FLOCK NOT FLYING... BART DECREM STEPS DOWN

Private Equity Week reports how Bart Decrem, founder of Flock, has stepped down from his position as CEO. Flock tried to create a lot of buzz without substance in its early days about a year ago, and I remember hearing various stories on some of their team members' arrogance.  I'll probably write that off as lack of experience since I'm assuming many of them are first-time entrepreneurs.

Anyway, it's an obvious bad sign for a startup when their founder leaves in its early days.  It's either because he realizes Flock is a sinking ship and he's selfishly not going down with it or because the investors pushed him out due to their disappointment or lack of faith in his management skills.

Valleywag has more bits here.

9/11

Instapundit provided some comments on the "THE PATH TO 9/11" movie that played yesterday on ABC. Of course the Dems protested this movie and asked ABC to take it off the air since it's more about truth than they and liberals are willing to admit.

Lawrence Kudlow has a post on Harvard's highly questionable move to inviting Mohammed Khatemi, the former president of Iran, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of September 11th. The administration at Harvard must hangout with Survivor's Jeff Probst.  Publius Pundit has some good info on the protest that was held at Harvard.

Kenneth Silber has an interesting post here, "Who's Going to Win?"

FORMER GOVERNOR GEORGE RYAN GOING TO JAIL

It's been two and a half weeks since my last post. During this time, Christine and I went to Los Cabos for a long weekend, hosted a conference on North and South Korea related issues,  on our new house, and of course worked to make GoingOn a kick ass company.

As I come back to blogging, it's depressing to see my home state's former governor, George Ryan, sent to jail on various corruption charges. Not just because he's Republican, but he because use to represent Illinois and should have been a politician with ethical leadership qualities.