Web Mission: UK startups come to Silicon Valley from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Oli Barrett, co-founder of Web Mission, talks about the group of 20 small startups from the United Kingdom that recently visited Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, and what the participants took away from the trip.
The 7-minute interview was conducted on the top floor of Moscone West during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
When the EconSM conference started out in 2006, the conference circuit looked pretty crowded for another entrant. But the folks behind EconSM — Rafat Ali and Staci D. Kramer, and now the new owner, ContentNext — have carved out a nice niche in the social media space (the SM used to stand for Social Media) and connected it with burgeoning developments in mobile.
First, the details of their upcoming event:
EconSM: Social Meets Mobile
When: May 14 (a week from Thursday)
Where: Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco
Cost: $450 — Socialmedia.biz readers get a 15% discount off the price of the conference and report by entering the discount password “SocialMediabiz”
Report: a 46-page report, “The Changing Mobile Industry and What It Means for Media Executives”
Details: Website info and Agenda
Of the gathering, Staci (a longtime friend) tells me: “When we held the first EconSM in 2006, most people were still trying to grasp what it meant much less how to make it a business. For many media companies, it was a gimmick, something to say they offered. Investors wanted to be in on the ground floor, entrepreneurs wanted to be the next MySpace/Facebook/Flickr/Digg/fill in the blank.
“Much has changed as we get ready for our third EconSM — including the name. The acronym is still the same but this year it’s about the intersection of social and mobile. Social media has passed the gimmick stage — although not everyone has figured that out — and is part of the daily fabric for an increasing number of people.
C an you feel it? The flutter of excitement. Call me a complete geek but nothing quite compares to a beta launch and the energy that surrounds it. So who is causing the latest buzz?
Lunch.com, based in Los Angeles, is a social review site where you can express your opinions and connect with users who share your passions. (See below for your invite-only code.)
Lunch launched in private beta at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week with the tagline “Feed Your Curiosity,” and quickly harnessed attention, with one review calling it a “Yelp 2.0.” In summary, Lunch appears to be a more complex rating site than we have seen in the past, with a focus on connecting people who share similar ideas and reviews. In addition, it offers some new and interesting features. Let’s check it out, shall we?
So what is it?
No, it’s not just another UGC (user-generated content) site. I was fortunate enough to play around in the interface and found Lunch to be a great balance between things we have grown to expect in an online social community as well as a few innovative ideas new to the space altogether. Members are able to rate and review anything, including books, recipes, gadgets and more, while also engaging with other members by rating the helpfulness of reviews.
Here is where it gets interesting.
At South By Southwest Interactive in Austin Texas, two weeks ago — inside the bloggers lounge — I ran into Julia Kaganskiy, the social media and community manager for Unigo.com.
If you haven’t heard of Unigo, you will. It’s a crowdsourced college guide that offers honest appraisals of life at hundreds of U.S. colleges, including the ability to find out what it’s like to major in a particular subject on a college campus.
Crowdsourcing doesn’t always work, but when users know their subject — and college students know their campuses — it can produce a more useful, authentic and accurate picture than that produced by traditional information sources. Julia says putting an editorial filter on crowdsourced content “sets it apart” and increases the signal level, and I think a lot of sites are finding the same thing.
Ever since heady days of broadcast.com back in the era of Web 1.0
there has always been promise in the field of Web video, and as the encoding technologies have grown more sophisticated and broadband penetration breaks new records every day, online video has exploded, but aside from a very few examples like Hulu no one seems to have the monetization of Web video figured out.
A couple of weeks ago while I was at Seedcamp Paris, I had the opportunity to talk to Emmanuel Gal founder of Brainient, a start-up that aims to tackle this most challenging market.
Back in January, when I attended Seedcamp Tel Aviv, I wrote about some of the priceless tips that investors shared with the startups there. In a similar panel discussion at Seedcamp Paris, Parisian investors and VCs shared more valuable tips. Among the investors in the panel discussion, which was moderated by Index Ventures’ Saul Klein, were Anne Gousset of Paris Développement (an incubator), Chipper Boulas of Boulas Ventures, Luis Courtot of Courtot Ventures, Xavier Lazarus of Elaia Partners and Philippe Colombel of Partech VC. It was interesting to hear what they all had to say.
The investors in Tel Aviv spoke a little bit about the current economic crisis. However, in Paris last month this crisis seemed to be a focal point of the investors’ discussion. Xavier of Elaia Partners brought up the point, right off the bat, that many companies that would have easily been funded a couple of years ago are now dealing with a much higher hurdle. Startups now not only need to show that they have a great product but also that it is sustainable, because nobody knows how much time it will take for the economy to improve.
Luis expanded on this, saying that now it is important for startups to demonstrate “proof of concept.” He said that a couple of years ago, as an investor you could simply fall in love with a product or service. However, he said, “today there is still love in the air but you need to demonstrate proof.”
