:: 39, somehow investor and probably entrepreneur
:: co founder Appsfire, ISAI
:: more here or Linkedin
> My Top iPhone apps
> My own little iPhone app
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Today was a good for Appsfire, our new service that allow you to share easily your favorite iPhone apps: we got great coverage from Louis Gray and Next Web.
We also released a new tool for iPhone developers and marketers/bloggers that will allow them to create smart iPhone apps links and getting real time stats on them: indeed Apple iTunes link are kind of ....long and not friendly for sharing. Soon we ll be introducing new tools for monetizing those links (but patience for now)
The real big news is that i was able to test our upcoming native iPhone app, that will allow anyone in 2 clicks to share your iphone apps. The experience is really simple because it is totally integrated with the contact book. You can view a first video demo below. But the final version will have more features (once approved by Apple)
The past 24h illustrate perfectly the reality of what the venture world and entrepreneurs have to face when it comes to liquidity events. You are either shooting for a small exit or a big one, willingly or not. Most of the time willingly. 
Yahoo buys Xoopit for an estimated 20m USD and Amazon buys Zappos for a bit less than 1 billion dollars. Both companies raised from VCs. Big shots (Accel for Xoopit and Sequoia for Zappos), but the return is obviously not the same.
I think Xoopit had bigger plans and this is what seduced Accel but it eventually sold out fast for not so much, not even returning the investment made (assuming that Accel took 30% for the company by putting 5M they got back 6M out of the 20m USD unless they defined different liquidity preference in case of small exit). For a VC a Xoopit like deal is a big fail.
The problem is that VCs do not have the bandwith for deals like Xoopit. They want to invest in Zappos-like startups. It is just a question of bandwith: partners don't have the time to put ressources in companies that exit at those levels.
The problem is that the reality of the web ecosystem is made mostly of startups that in the best case will be Xoopits, companies that will exit in less than 50m USD. In Israel for example 90% of the internet startups that i see, including some backed by great VCs won't go further. How many Zappos have been built (on the web) in Israel so far? ICQ but mainly Shopping, Quigo and a few more. That's all.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Actually i think you can be a great entrepreneur and highly happy if you build such a company. The problem is that the VC industry is not designed for those deals. And there will be lots of those in the coming years.
This is why a new generation of funds are trying to deal with them: Ycombinators, TechStars, Founder Fund, Profounder Capital, Brickhouse, Felicis Venture, Softech VC....
Those new small funds take the lead on smaller deals/exit.
My belief is that traditionnal VCs should not ignore those deals, obviously not by using the same tools.
For that they need to build the investment infrastructure differently. They need to get the approval from their LPs, then create a separate structure with 1 guy, 2 max that will manage up to 20m USD with close to zero back office and management fees (except salary) and a different carried interest. Partners of the VC would not invest time at all in those deals unless they start to gain unusual momentum and become candidate for later funding.
I think Israel needs more VCs that shoot that way. Europe right now is seeing one or 2 structure going into that direction (i am helping one getting on its feet in France right now).
The reality is that most entrepreneurs are happy building Xoopits like startups and this is a great news. In the next 12 months i anticipate a new wave of entrepreneurs and startups that will build such compnaies. They just need the adequate backup.
Technorati Tags: venture business capital entrepreneur xoopit zappos
I don't see any reasonable reason why Yahoo would pay so much for a browser plugin for your email. Today Yahoo is supposed to have bought Xoopit for 20 million dollars. I personally like Xoopit. Although i stopped using it. Was too slow and not performing well enough.
I do believe our mailbox will become more social and that eventually webmails will offer what Xoopit was trying to do but without plugin, So the move by Yahoo makes sense in a way.
But Let's be clear a browser plugin is definitely not the way to make a service become mainstream. Xoopit has at best 100/200k active users which is nothing compared to the massive 200 million Yahoo mail users. Xoopit is far from perfect and is not really making money.
So why Yahoo did buy this company? Not for a service they could create in 3 months. Social connectors are easy to add, just like they did to their new Yahoo homepage. Maybe for the team which seems to have a good sense of execution even though the product is not perfect. Not for the revenue and not for the active user base.
The real reason is because of Data intelligence about their damn competitor Google. Xoopit was mainly used by Gmail users because this is where it was adding most value. For Yahoo Xoopit is a mining source of information on how Gmail users are using email and how to improve Yahoo mail which looks real pale compared to Google service.
This being said, i think this is a lot of money for intelligence. I think they just did not want Google to get Xoopit and paid a premium for it too.
PS1: unlike Techcrunch i don t think Google let this deal go. I think they just came to the conclusion they will do it by themself for much less (probably by Gmail labs)
PS2: from a VC point of view Xoopit is a big fail. The company raised 6.5m USD in 2 rounds. It was obviously a fire sale. I assume the deal was not paid in cash for most of it and i assume VCs would not be so happy with Yahoo stock right now, specially when you expect at least a 5X return minimum. Xoopit was sold because maybe the investors did not see any clear business potential in it.
Technorati Tags: xoopit gmail mail yahoo google
In a recent panel, a Google VP Vic Gundotra declared that the future of mobile is not the AppStore model, but the browser (as an environnement for web based apps) arguing that over time the mobile browser will have advanced capabilities that will great enhance the user experience and sophistication of web apps versus desktop apps.
I read a lot about mobile browsers and the evolution of HTML which will enable offline capabilities and better interaction with the software. But i can't help of thinking that the time the browser will overtake the mobile desktop is not going to come so soon. For a parallel benchmark just look at your computer. No matter how fast the internet has become and how strong the CPUs of our machines are, most people still use mostly desktop apps.
Why?
Because this is just more convenient and faster. But not only. Internet users have grown with the reflex of using softwares to perform actions. This usage pattern is not going to disappear tomorrow. Application = Software in most users' minds.
There is also a second reason more important to that: users don't care. They don't care to know how a solution is solved as long as it is well solved. What they care about is the quality of the app. But also the discovery and integration mechanism with the mobile device. Apps are so successful because of the perfect integration of itunes and the appstore with the iPhone. Apple could have decided to put their web apps. They did not. A browser as such is not helping users find what they want. Unless Google build it otherwise.
Obviously the trend is changing. More and more apps are moving to the cloud. They offer less capabilities but are good enough for most basic needs. But this trend is not accelerating for now. And it will take years until we all move our stuff to the cloud.
I see web apps as a perfect extension to a desktop app. I think it is not possible to consider you only build a solution without providing several access points to your users. Like i said in the past, the future of the browser are the browsers, meaning several entry points for a same solution that provide different context of usage for different type of users. Google is well placed to know it: they offer multiple access point of Google search, Gmail and Picasa.
App Stores is going to become the mainstream vehicle for all OS/Device manufacturers for the next 5 years at least until Web providers can really provide rich web apps (Blackberry, Palm Pre, Windows, Symbian, LG, Verizon,... they all have or will have their own appstore). But even then, i am not sure this will be enough.
Take the killer category of mobile apps: Games. In order to provide a full rich experience over a mobile browser you ll need more than HTML 5 not mentionning that 3D rendering will require strong local ressources and CPU. Even today on your computer games (not casual) need to be locally installed and run even if connected to the web (they are browsers in some kind of way)
Google probably has to say something about the future of browser because 1. Apple is just smashing them for now 2. they need to prepare the upcoming ChromeOS adoption.
My belief is that like on our computer, on our mobile our time will be split between local apps connected to the web and some that will run in our browsers (read this post for more details)
I even personnally think, like mentionned here, that Apps will become as big as the internet. [10 million apps by 2020] Which makes me even happier for Appsfire as a key discovery solution for relevant apps.
Technorati Tags: apps apple google mobile applications appsfire
The number is impressive. 1 year later, The Appstore has reached 1.5 billion applications downloaded. 65k apps, 100k developpers (for me the real impressive number is that one).
But the real number i am interested to know about is the number of active apps, meaning the number of apps that have been downoaded and used during the last 30 days. Only Apple can provide this data and this is actually the only data that matters. My guess is that less than 30% of those 65k are really use actively at best. But i have no way to sustain it.
I am personally not interested in the cumulated number of downloads of the applications that have X versions. I am not interested in the number of applications that have been downloaded and never used or tried then deleted. I am not interested in the number of downloads of apps that have been discontinued or not maintained by their creators.
Like for Software the number of downloads is not interesting. It definitely translates a trend of interest. But not the real level of activity.
I remember that at ICQ the company was proudly announced 200 million+ downloads. But at the end of the day only 10-20 million of active users were to be counted. And those matter because those are monetizable. The rest is pure dust.
I think a lot of the incative download has to do with the fact that users can't find relevantly what matters to them. This is why we created Appsfire. So people can find via their peers Apps that are likely to be interesting for them. Over time we ll evaluate if the download apps via Appsfire have a better chance to be used or not.
In any case hats off to Apple who is for now showing the way to the mobile industry. Every player now think Appstore: from Device manufacturers to OS like Windows or Android and even to Mobile operators.
Technorati Tags: iphone apps appstore appsfire
Twitter is not making any dollars and everyone seems obsessed with that question. Rightly so. They are trying to experiment advertising (i have tried it myself) but i am not convinced this is the right way to go. There are at least 10 easy ways Twitter could make money (this will be a different post).
The question i wanted to ask today is about the business Twitter generates as a phenomenon for others.
Think about it: there are so many ways companies or people make money because of /Thanks to Twitter. Just to mention a few :
Premium iPhone Apps for Twitter (Tweetie,...), SMS for operators, Twitter conferences, Books, Gurus "Training" about how to use twitter in corporations, Twitter premium services (CoTweet, TweetLater,...), Twitter Templates, people finding jobs, investors (i know 2 of cases), customers, providers, Tshirts and mechandising, domain names for mashups and all those apps out there (Godaddies and co)....
Israel is a great country to find top noth developers on all sorts of platform.
But one thing i am really surprised about is that although the iPhone is a great business ecosystem with more than 65k apps and 1 billion dollars in revenue, Israel is nearly absent of the map. Even Twitter that is still not really taking off in Israel starts to become an active player for the platform with a dozens of apps/mashups.
Actually the only company that i know of that is really doing a great job on the iPhone is TuneWiki (not only the iPhone btw). Fring has also a nice app, although my preference goes for Nimbuzz. But other than that, nothing.
Why?
One thing i am totally convinced about: the only way to become good as something in any field is by practicing. Observing, listening, thinking, considering, debating, arguing, correcting, advising, mentoring and even investing is definitely not enough. I would even say it could jeopardize what you believe your skill can be.
I have so many personal examples of that. I learned playing jazz alone. A key starting point for me was the discovery of late pianist Erroll Garner. It stimulated my brain to understand how it is possible to take a dead boring melody and make an amazing piece of art out of it in Real Time. I then started to listen and listen. Read about jazz. go to concerts. Eventually what really helped me was putting myself on the piano and get to understand how those chords and harmonies are built and how you build a new melody on top of a melody (usually called improvisation)
I think the same applies in the web. No matter how much you can read about startups, meet with entrepreneurs, go to conference, even invest in startups. At the end of the day the only real way to understand how to build a great web service is by actually creating one. Although i was already a big fan of Twitter and the iPhone, i learned much more about those ecosystems by doing Topify and AppsFire and bumping into an endless number of challenges and issues than by using related services or reading blogs about them for nearly 2 years.
Because this is what it is about. Problem solving. Until you find yourself in front of a massive wall you need climb you can't understand what the story is all about. I am not only referring to the technical part of the solution but the psychological part of it. Understanding the pressure of emergency and ongoing competition is not something you can explain. You need to experience it.
The other critical part of problem solving is find the right way to make it as simple as possible. And this is REALLY hard. The obvious in appearance is complex in execution (Einstein once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"). Finding the simplest path to a problem solution is really hard. And there is no magical formula except doing and iterating. Learning by doing = Learning by failing.
In addition cycles of iteration help you improve each time a little about the way you solve problems. This is why i believe Israeli entrepeneurs, that are originally not so good at building consumer related stuff, are becoming better and better at it. The first generation of web entrepreneurs are starting new stuff again and the quality of execution becomes each time better, because they learned how to solved some specific issues.
My personnal recommendation to anyone who wants to jump into the web space: create something. Even minor. If you have to recruit someone be it an employee, a contractor or a consultant, find someone who actually created something (that you can relate to your space of course). I prefer looking at a mashup you created or a blog you are writing than at a resume.
You can enjoy food as much as you want and be a gourmet expert. There is no way you be good at cooking if you never experimented cooking. But unlike cooking and jazz the great things about the web is that the learning process is pretty unexpensive. The cost of technology is close to zero (before scale). And the feedback process is immediate (unlike music). So you should not hesitate to jump.
I created TechCrunch France with zero investment. We set Topify, Appsfire and soon project TD with zero dollar investment. You need just some time and complementary skills to start. And those are not great examples because i can't say those are massive sucesses. But they give a pretty good sense of what is possible to do with very little.
As a VC i know this is helping me also understand better companies i meet. I am not sure this is a recipe for all investors. But for me this is the recipe that works.
Technorati Tags: execution startup internet israel learning doing tips entrepreneurs
I did not say so. @Pierre did and @Loic who knows us both seems to implicitly confirms via a reTweet.
-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl
pierre @OurielOhayon Your avatar is highly distracting because it looks like me. 
OurielOhayon @pierre I think in real life we look alike a lot. Someone told me ;) 
loic RT @pierre @OurielOhayon Your avatar is highly distracting because it looks like me. LOL
What i preferred less was Pierre's final word. :( Anyway thanks to Twitter for my first ever micro-conversation with eBay founder
