i.want.world

saving the world

Found a quote today which undoubtedly resonates with Ecologisca..

"Today's entrepreneurs routinely apply business techniques to philanthropy. Some of them are even using a venture-capital model, investing in a range of promising start-ups and making longer-term funding conditional on performance... [they] often blur the distinction between making money and offering charity. Some use the profits from their main business to cross-subsidise their charitable work."

estimating the value of an idea

So you have a great idea.  How big is it?  What is the value of the idea to the organization?  Most people get hung up trying to come up with the exact answer.  In most cases, you won't find the perfect answer.  Especially if you are breaking new ground.  What I find lacking is the basic skill of "estimation".  Estimating is nothing more than using the information you know to create a "good enough" approximation of the market opportunity for an idea.

The objective is not the find the answer but to find out what makes up the answer.  So what are the steps?

1. Take the question (how big is the total number of customers for my idea?)
2. Break down the drivers that allow you to estimate the answer to the question.
3. For each driver create an educated estimate of its value
4. Create the estimated answer to the question

You're not done yet ... You need to estimate when the value will be realized.

1. Determine the total life cycle of your idea (2 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc)
2. Spread that time line evenly over the five phases of "innovation adoption"
3. Apply the adoption rate for each phase based on Rogers rules ..
   • 2.5% for Innovators
   • 13.5% for Early Adaptors
   • 34% for Early Majority
   • 34% for Late Majority
   • 16% for Laggards

You're not done yet ... Now you have the total value.  You need to determine the value to you and your organization.

1. For each phase, apply your estimated market share.  Be realistic ...
2. Apply some estimated revenue per unit/customer.

Now you have the estimated value of an idea.

To learn the rest, listen to the podcast ...

disruptive innovation

A couple of years ago I first heard the story of Markus Frind, the founder of dating website PlentyofFish.com who, it was said, worked about an hour a day on his site and was making $10,000 a month. That was annoying enough. Now, a recent profile of Frind in Inc. magazine says Frind works an hour a day and brings in $10 million a year.

I bring this up not to annoy you, but to point out that Frind has built his fortune mainly by following the disruptive playbook. His “blueprint,” as he described it to Inc.: “Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense.”

More

entrepreneurship

euro startups are still pitching

via TechCrunch by Mike Butcher on 10/27/08

The European startup scene appears to be relatively unfazed by the downturn so far. But then, they are, even now, still getting used to the mere idea of pitching their idea. O’Reilly’s Web 2 Expo Europe event in Berlin last week featured a bunch of startups all trying to get some exposure to a swathe of European VCs at a “Pitchcamp”. But luckily it featured a crop of some of Europe’s most interesting companies to date…

wasting energy

Moore's Law has liberated us from the thought of treating computer transistors as a scarce item, ultimately allowing us to reach a point of where we "waste computation power". Consequently, the creation of the graphical user interface and the computing environment we know today are essentially a waste of computing resources.

Can we waste energy just as we are wasting "computation power"?

Yes, once it is abundant and/or treat it as such.

Clean renewable energy is by nature free (perpetually naturally replenished). Its democratization, upon depletion of our current primary source of energy, will ultimately lead to renewable energy's widespread adaptation and quicker innovations. Thus it has become the core goal of our firm to partake in the fulfillment of this revolutionary and innovative concept of free mass-distribution.

Related articles:

• Understanding Moore's Law

help ecologisca create a solution

Google: The all-time biggest company based on free

I've always assumed that Google was the best--and biggest--example in history of a business model based on free, but until today I hadn't actually run the numbers. Before I get to those, let's definite what "built on free" means.

Until the advent of the Web, the biggest companies built on free were broadcasters in radio or TV ("free-to-air" services, where a third party--the advertisers--pay for content to be free to consumers). In the rabbit-ears broadcast era, these were pure free plays: virtually all their revenue came from direct advertising payments or syndication revenues from their local affiliates, who were just passing along their own advertising revenues.

This is what's commonly referred to as "the media business model". Sometimes it means that advertisers subsidize 100% of the content costs, other times they subsidize just 70-80% of those costs, as in the case of magazines and newspapers.

Since the advent of cable TV and satellite radio, the media business model has evolved. TV broadcasters are bigger but they're also more diversified, with a mix of revenues from traditional ad-supported free media and paid content, from DVDs to pay-per-view. Only terrestrial radio remains purely free. 

Meanwhile, the pure free-to-consumers media business model has moved to the Web, but mostly in the shape of companies that don't fall neatly into traditional definitions of "media", such as Google or Yahoo.

So to properly see how the Web free companies compare to the broadcast free companies, we'd have to carefully tease out just the free parts of the broadcasters's revenues. Fortunately, we don't have to bother because it's really no contest.

Google, at $17 billion in annual revenues last year, is larger than any broadcaster in history, free and non-free elements combined.  The biggest broadcasters, ABC, CBS and NBC, are all in the $14-$15 billion range. The biggest radio network, Clear Channel, had revenues of $7 billion. Meanwhile, on the Web, Google's closest free competitor is Yahoo, at $7 billion.

So congrat, Google. You are indeed the all-time biggest company built on free. And a good thing, too, given how much time I've been spending at the Googleplex of late.

via The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on 9/8/08

2008 application zeitgeist Seedcamp

2008 application zeitgeist

via seedcamp by Morland on 8/13/08

We thought it might be interesting to take the several hundred applications we received and look for some aggregate patterns, so I grabbed the answers to some of the more relevant questions and (after a little sed manipulation to strip HTML and make sure no confidential application info slipped through) fed them to Jonathan Feinberg's excellent Wordle. The results are below. It's a little dirty (e.g. I wish "open" and "source" were one phrase) but even without too much manual polish it should be a good indicator. Enjoy - and be sure to click through for the full size images.

Q3: What are you creating?




Q10: How will you make money?




Q16: What tools will you use?

when VCs try to do improv startup pitching

 "it's the long tail of chickens." 

Nimrod Lehavi & Michael Eizenberg - video powered by Metacafe