Kennet puts €6.5 million into GoViral's branded video network

Go Viral, a social video network that happens to hire very, very smart people (including my friend Rene) has received funding from Kennet.

This is a very interesting space... a bit like SEO for the beginning of search, handholding advertisers and linking them up with the networks...for a fee. As the Brits say, "watch this space."

Kennet puts €6.5 million into GoViral’s branded video network

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Tencent in the news

Most folks outside of China have never heard of Tencent, or their hyper-popular service, QQ.

Tencent is the most sucesful Chinese internet firm with a market cap of $80 BILLION (4x Yahoo!'s current value).

In terms of value to investors Oliver Wymann recently ranked them as the highest value creating firm in the Telecom and Media space, followed closely by the South African Media conglomerate Naspers...which happens to own 40%+ of Tencent.

Their success comes not only from their massive number of users, (355M according to this recent post by Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital) but more importantly by the revenue they generate per user ($3.38 in real dollars, which Bill equates to $17 on a cost-of-living adjusted basis).

Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's an education thing, but QQ's over the top, in your-face selling of Avatars, gifts, virtual goods and cute penguins... but it works! Tencent's mobile deals and ability for users to extend their network from PC (internet cafe as primary PC based access point) to mobile with significant success.

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Evan Williams of Twitter on Charlie Rose

Interesting vision of the "human need" for communication driving Twitter and, 5 years from now "normal people" using Twitter like "normal people" use Facebook and MySpace.

Looking at "normal people" around me (wife, father, non-techie friends) I accept the notion of a need for communication and a general acceptance of social networks as a way of sharing more than we would have been comfortable with 5 years ago... The evolution from a phone call to an email to a text message to a facebook wall post to a tweet does sound natural. The question is whether the platform for that outreach will be Twitter or not.

Eric Schmidt seems to believe that GMail could take that place.

You know [the economy] is bad when...