Doom and gloom drives action

Remember the infamous Seqouia RIP slides... well it seems the company CEOs took it to heart. GigaOM has posted a table of layoffs by Sequoia-funded firms including 40 at Adbrite and 25 at Aliph (makers of the uber-cool Jawbone).

It totally makes sense to cut some fat and focus on the core business. Besides, these numbers pale in comparison to the Wall Street and City numbers (or the layoffs from 2001).

Techcruunch does one better and has a layoff tracker graph.

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Pedro Aspe at Wharton

An interesting speech from Pedro Aspe, former Mexican Finace Secretary during the last massive Mexican crisis, now Chairman of Evercore Partners speaking at Wharton.

He uses his experience and background in "financial messes" to eavluate the "mess" in the "neighbor of the North."

Ad market to grown (ONLY) 6%

Doug Anmuth at Barclay's says that ad spend will grown 6%... That's 6% more than many would have expected.

PaidContent did a nice roundup of the forecasts with Nielsen seeing a 5.6% drop in first quarters of 2008.

EMarketer (anslyst of the analysts) forecasts 8.9% increase.


My assesment.... who the hell knows... With Ponzi schemes left and right, even Goldman doing layoffs and everyone being VERY cautious going into 2009, I would not bet my job on any growth percentage.

The new browser wars: FacebookConnect vs FriendConnect

It's a year ending in 8... there are two technology titans standing in opposite corners of what is to become the stuff of tech legends... At stake is the underlying communications platform that will define the next evolution of the internet... It's not Netscape versus Microsoft... It's Facebook vs Google, Facebook Connect versus Friend Connect and the fight for the platform that will power the social graph and interconnectivity across sites, people and content.

CNET tips the current round to Facebook while the guys at AlFacebook keep tabs on the Facebook Connect implementations.

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Pains of entrepreneurship in Europe

Martin Varsavsky, Argentine-Spanish-entrepreneur-excellence and the poster child for European founders just posted an insightful - but depressing - piece about the challenges facing entrepreneurs in Europe.

It focuses on cultural attitudes towards risk and failure

"USA has a lenient view of failure. Failure in America is not seen as a lifelong chronic disease but as a test of character. VCs in the States look for people who have had a combination of successes and failures as they are more prepared to deal with the tough realities of business life. In Europe however failure is seen as just that, failure, a stigma that stays with you for the rest of your life."

and the legal nightmares faces by founders (who become personally liable)
"In Europe going bankrupt is the same as firing all the employees and you as the founder, PERSONALLY owe the money that has to be paid to the employees for letting them go even if the business has done nothing wrong. "

Add to this the challenges of scaling a business across many countries and languages (incremental cost not faced by US start-ups) and legal issues of cross border transfers, capital repatriation, and "worker rights" (see french ability to manipulate this clause) and it does prove that building a globally-competitive start-up from Europe seems to have the cards stacked against the entrepreneur.

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Google Adwords supports iPhone and Android

Today Google's mobile team announced the ability for all of our Adwords advertisers to target their desktop ads to high-end (Android and iPhone) devices.

There is a lot of speculation about how many advertisers Adwords has. The point, however, is that what is arguably the front end for the broadest online advertising platform now enables all of its advertisers to deliver appropriate ads (and deliver associated ROI).

I believe that one of the primary issues with mobile advertising has been the challenge of educating broad-based advertisers about how to discover the medium, create appropriate ads for the medium and track said ads' performance. That all goes away... Think about the implication of 10+ million iphones with Google ads and 30x the search usage of a typical device across many, many advertisers...

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iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile

Endgadget reports that iPhone has surpassed Windows Mobile sales.

Back in May, 2007 Ballmer stated "the future of the mobile handset business will primarily depend on software influence rather than hardware."

Android, RIM, Nokia open sourcing Symbian...I am not sure the world of dollars-a-pop mobile OSs supports Ballmers assessment.

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Top mobile searches

AOL and Yahoo released information on the top mobile searches of the year and as I've stated publicly before, many of them are "directional" queries using a search box to reach a destination...in these cases social networks as a destination.

Moconews summarized the news and highlighted AOL's top queries as being MySpace, AIM, iPhone, MocoSpace and Facebook.

Yahoo's top queries were MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, "movies" and "weather."

What does this teach us?
1) That mobile users want to find not browse
2) That people want to get their pokes, PMs and winks from their social graphs on their phone (see success of new 3 phone with facebook)
3) That I spend way too much time reading news about mobile....

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Apple app store most downloaded apps

Moconews reports that Apple released a list of the top iPhone app store apps... Happy to report that Lightsaber made it to the top. A great example of the self-selection of geeks who are actually buying and using the iPhone!

Nokia N97

Earlier this week some Nokia exec told TechCrunch that the internet was not ready for what was about to be announced...

And then they came out with the N97 instead...




I think that the real announcement, however, is the definition of a new word. It seems there is humankind and now...mobilekind.

I love my finnish friends and their mul-ti-media com-pu-ters!