Great video that Bob Stumpel posted on his Web 2.0 blog. You can view it here. It’s a panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki with lots of different entrepreneurs talking about how they started, what their business models were and are now, what the good and bad sides of founding a business are and why you just have to work yourself through the ups and downs.
Great stuff to listen too and a good mix of sites that partly didn’t or still don’t have a real business model.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
What’s your Business Model?
MyBlogLog Tracking AdSense and YPN
There we go, the real business model of MyBlogLog
is out and it is coming to you thanks to Jennifer Slegg from Jensense. In this post she talks about a little bit of code in the general MyBlogLog code you put on your blog. We all know that MyBlogLog will know who comes to your site and from where, which alone is some very interesting information. But the little addition to the code, allows MyBlogLog to track your Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network ads.
Tracking in this sense means that they know how many ads you serve and how many ads you get as well as on which ads. Based on the Google AdSense click url they know for example where the click is going, the client id, the position on the ad and more. They can also find out the text of the ad. With some additional javascript they also know where on your blog the ad is.
So in the end, they know if people click more on AdSense or YPN ads in similar locations, which formats work best for AdSense, which ads work best, which wording changes for the same keywords and same clients but different ads work best and so on. And the fun thing is that Yahoo! bought MyBlogLog some time ago. Of course, the code seems to have been there beforehand, but hey, this is likely something that Yahoo! is very happy about. They should actually include it in the flicks badges!
The amount of data and the quality (or potential quality) of it is amazing. Even more congratulations on the buy from me!
Update: Answer from the MyBlogLog people here.
Google Reporting Feed Subscribers
Techcrunch is reporting that Google is now giving out subscriber numbers to their feed services. So people subscribed to your feed via Google Services are not showing up in FeedBurner. I for one, just added 46 new subscribers. Well not really, but now I know about them. 
Money Rules the World
Sadly, this is in German, but it’s a great study project from 2005, in three parts, explaining the power of money. In short, you need to make people work to control the planet. To make people work, you invent money, because that makes exchanging things very easy. Of course some people have more money, and they give it to you because they are afraid to loose it. You give them a bit more money back in return, like 2% per year. Of course, because there is a law the requires a bank to only hold 2-10% of the money they lend out, you can then lend out 10 times that money for a credit of 10% per year, making you money for nothing. This goes on an on. Very well done. See it here.
Fast Forward with Holtzbrinck Ventures
Holtzbrinck Ventures, who are building up an impressive portfolio (plus Webnews.de) in Germany, have started something new called “Fast Forward” and I really like the idea. It is something that is really needed in Germany and might push things a bit forward.
The idea is simple. You submit your business plan, or rather a shorter one, focussing on the market potential, the founding team and how to use the money or rather what kind of money you need in the next 12 months. The goal is to have a proof of concept with the 150k of course. That obviously means that they won’t fund a biotech startup with this kind of money.
The money will be given as a loan to the company and will only convert into equity (at a discount to account for the added risk) with the first round of investment.
What I really like about this is that it helps Holtzbrinck Ventures get a foot in the door in a market where business angels are more and more becoming an alternative for companies that are looking for money. With a timeframe of 3 weeks until investment, a good founding team with a few good numbers and a good case might be able to move really fast with this.
So congratulations to Holtzbrinck Ventures. Good move! (source)
FON gets Competition
This was bound to happen, and now it’s a fact. FON gets competition in the name of Whisher, which was launched at DEMO yesterday. Venturebeat has a good write-up about it, including that Benchmark Capital Europe with Klaus Hommels led the investment round. Interestingly enough both start-ups are starting in Spain, but that is another matter. The interesting thing is not to see who will get the better coverage. In my view FON has the upside that coffee shops and the like will get a router for free or cheap and can really earn money in the system, meaning that you are likely to find a FON hotspot in a coffee shop or hotel in the not too distant future (I actually found a small conference hotel near here that has one ). The good side with Whisher is really that it has a very likely viral effect. I often go to friends and they have a wireless lan and I have to ask for the key and things. With Whisher we can all be part of a community that trusts each other and allows us to share each others wifi in an easy and simple manner. You simply install an application that gives you access to other hotspots that are part of the network, simple as that.
I will have to try it out to get a better idea but they have the money to really push it now, which is good. We need more stuff like this and it is still undecided who will win in the end.
P.S.: And I am starting to see some scenarios where a pub might really want to have a Whisher hotspot with community features rather than a FON hotspot. They don’t really need to earn money but can see it as a marketing expense, which they do anyway. We’ll see how this plays out.
