Entrepreneur Watch

Startup profile: Funding Universe

I came across an interesting company at the Web Ventures conference last week, although I'm still not sure if it has legs. Funding Universe offers a site for entrepreneurs to help them get funding. I've long felt that with the death of publications like Red Herring and Upside, there's a dearth of good resources for entrepreneurs. The new Red Herring, relaunched under new ownership, does not focus on entrepreneurs any more, which I think it should do.

Funding Universe offers weekly chats with angel investors, archives of documents that help educate you through the funding process, a service that rates your business plan as often as you like, the ability to upload documents and video for VCs to see, events with potential funders and consultations with funding experts. Most of the services are offered for a fee.

It takes a while for something like this to develop the credibility. There's a forum where entrepreneurs can post questions, supposedly sharing ideas and getting help from peers, but currently it's infected by people who sign up for the free service and spam it with services like home refinancing and phone cards. The organization needs to restrict forums to real entrepreneurial members. It will never get credibility unless it straightens this out.

There's a blog that's a bit more useful, but is weighted toward events and companies in Utah, where the company is based. Funding Universe wants to be a nationwide resource, helping people who do not reside in places like Silicon Valley.

It's a good idea. Entrepreneurs need a place where they can interact, exchange ideas an stories, find good information and resources, refer each other, and read useful articles. Maybe a members-only social network.

I talked with CEO Brick Blake at Web Ventures, and suggested some things he ought to have. Interviews with VCs, articles about funding trends, a place where entrepreneurs can rate VCs based on their experience, good advice columns from service providers such as lawyers, VCs, marketing experts, etc. He seemed interested. But the service still has a way to go and needs a little more sophistication to become really useful.

Google adds security

Now this is a really good move on Google's part -- giving us free virus and spyware programs from Symantec and PC Tools. Google is determined to make everything free, and is doing a good job at it.

I use PC Tool's Spyware Doctor and love it. I've used Symantec's anti-virus stuff and hate it. It slows down my computer, keeps insisting that I must use ALL its tools with an annoying pop-up every time I start my computer (I refuse to use its firewall program because it screws up and made me keep entering my product key for every part of the package I bought.)

And Google's offering does not include all the features Symantec and PC Doctor offer, the ones they make you pay for. But I'll check them out. I hope the Symantec feature works better than my paid version did.

Google email down, Yahoo email up

This is a switch. Yahoo is making a good move for Yahoo mail, while Google apps, including Gmail, is having problems.

Yahoo's announcement that it will now offer unlimited storage for Yahoo mail is a good acknowledgment of the trends on the internet and an attempt to out-Google Google. Remember that Google was the company that first made online email really useful by offering a gigabyte of free storage in 2004, while Yahoo offered a stingy 4 megabytes and Microsoft only gave you a stingier 2 megabytes. One good emailed photo would use up your storage capacity. If it weren't for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft would still be forcing you to upgrade to a paid version to get decent storage.

Motley Fool also reminds us that AOL already offers unlimited storage, so this isn't exactly new. Also, it's unlikely that any gmail user has ever hit the limit of their 2.8 gigabyte storage capacity (I'm not even sure anyone has reached Yahoo's previous limit of 1 gigabyte), so Yahoo's move is more of a PR campaign than anything revolutionary.

But it's a good PR move that probably won't really cost Yahoo anything, and shows that it's getting serious about maintaining its lead with Yahoo mail. It's getting a lot of coverage.

Plus, this PR move comes at a time when Google is getting some really bad press. Google apps and Gmail are crashing for some people. I've occasionally encountered an error in Google docs and spreadsheets that says some of my changes may not have been saved before losing the connection, when there was no reason to lose the connection. It goes back up immediately, but I have to re-enter a few lines of info. It is annoying.

People should also keep in mind that Google still lists this stuff as beta. It really does release products before all the bugs are worked out, and only takes them out when it's sure of their stability.

But the bugs seriously put into question Google's ability to replace Microsoft apps with an online service. We can't afford afford to use products that are unstable (like Microsoft programs never crash.) Still, it's a serious PR problem for Google.  As I said before, perception counts for a lot. Google is already accused of being too ambitious, and if too many problems crop up, people will wonder if it can handle it.

What do Google users want?

The Google Blogoscoped forum started an interesting string, the Google Wish List. So far, there are 91 entries listing the features these Googlers would like to see from the company.

The winner, with the most entries: GDrive.

Google hiring hardware engineers

About a year ago, rumors of the Google PC were running around the internet. The rumors actually go back several years, but for some reason it became a topic a year ago. Since nothing has come out yet, some have concluded the rumors were false.

But Google is working on hardware. dgfghgfh wrote a comment in my blog about the Google phone, pointing to a job listing at Google for a "Networking Hardware Engineer, Senior - Mountain View"

Google is looking for more expertise in building network servers. Required experience goes all the way down to the chip-design level:

• PC/server chipsets and peripherals.
• BIOS, driver, and Linux kernel development.
• High performance bus and memory systems.
• FPGA/ASIC development.

Google is already the biggest server manufacturer in the world, so this isn't surprising. But it shows that Google is not afraid to build its own hardware. How soon before it's making hardware for public consumption?

Or how about this one for a logic designer to design chips for wireless information systems?

Google organizes information and makes it accessible and useful. To improve accessibility, Google is experimenting with a few wireless communications systems including some completely novel concepts. We are building a small team of top-notch Logic Designers and Analog Designers aimed at nothing less than making the entire world's information accessible from anywhere for free.

Google wants everyone to have free wireless access to the internet.

And here's one for a performance analysis engineer to "join several of our efforts towards building the world's most effective computing platform."

How about someone to work on hardware for online publishing? Will Google help publishers move to the online world?

Google is hiring Engineers to develop products for print publications. We are looking for people with experience in newspaper and magazine vertical including advertising, online publishing, document production, and more. Our goal is to bring our search and advertising technologies to print publications to enhance the end user experience while helping the publishers and the advertisers.

You can't say Google is just a software company.

Donna Bogatin Watch: Dare to compare Yahoo and Google

Our favorite Google-basher reports today on a challenge from Yahoo to compare search results. Nice try from Yahoo, but it's going to be tough for it to gain any traction with this.

Not that Yahoo won't compare well. But nobody has had much success in convincing people that they're as good as Google.

I wrote in Conferenza about some doings at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference last week, and the issue of competing with Google came up.

The conference is a chance for executives at still-private companies to make their pitches to VCs. There were several search companies in the competition, most for specialized search niches, such as local search and video search. But a few were trying to become broad-based search engines with new technologies, such as natural language processing that allows you to write queries in plain English. Most people are not very good at structuring their search terms to get the best results, so some VCs thought this might help (not that Google is ignoring this technology either.) 

A panel of venture capitalists debated whether there was any room for a new, mainstream search company to compete with Google. Ken Elefant from Opus Capital and Eric Hippeau from Softbank thought it possible, although Hippeau noted that it was "not for the faint of heart." After all, Google came out of nowhere when everyone thought Yahoo had the market sewn up.

But most were skeptical. Blind taste tests have already showed that results from other search engines are as good as Google's. But when the testers knew which search engine they were testing, they tended to rate Google higher than the rest. The perception is out there: you can't beat Google.

In the conference's most embarrassing moment, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners demonstrated this point by asking the audience -- all technically savvy folks -- how many of them used Google as their primary search engine. Every hand in the audience seemed to go up. So he asked who DIDN'T use Google first. Only one person in the audience raised her hand -- Anke Audenaert, a Yahoo executive.

It's hard to beat Google's reputation. I wish Yahoo the best of luck. They'll need it.

Google's pay-for-results ad model

Google is playing with an interesting new ad model, in which advertisers pay only when someone actually buys a product from them.

I've always wondered why sites don't try a 3-tiered system:

Put up a text ad that says you can get more information, including an offer of a free or discounted product, without leaving the site you're on. People click on it and a small window pop-up plays a video ad for your product. At the end of the ad, you print out a bar-code coupon for your freebie. The advertiser pays one price for this click. This generates brand awareness.

During the ad play, there's a link to the sponsor's site. If you click on it and go to the site, the advertiser pays another fee. Deeper brand awareness.

Then if the person buys something from the site, the advertiser pays a third fee for the referral.

The Google phone is still alive

Rumors: Google's blackberry-like device, with VoIP, running on Apple's iPhone!

There is a lot of noise about the fact that Google has denied it's building its own cell phone. That just means that Google is designing the software, and will go with existing hardware companies to build the device. Although I've heard sources say that Google does want to make the hardware, and is spending big bucks to do so. But it will work with existing cell phone makers and, most interestingly, could be part of Apple's iPhone!

Here's an interesting note. CNet reported on March 5 that Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners wrote in his blog that "an inside source has told him that [the Google phone] will be a Blackberry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap and optimized Java and that it offer voice over Internet Protocol."

CNet links to Simeon's blog at:
http://simeons.wordpress.com/2007/03/04
/the-real-google-phone/

But that March 4 posting has been removed! Sounds like Simeon's "inside source" -- probably someone at Google -- made him take it down.

Simeon said Google is not building the device itself. Via CNet:

"Apparently, Google is planning to build distribution relationships with multiple carriers by allowing them to minimize subscription and marketing costs," Simeonov writes. "In other words, Google will market the phone online and carriers will fulfill. How fast can you say dumb pipe?"

So Google denies it's making hardware -- at least in the mobile phone category. But it does do hardware. At the CNET post, someone who calls himself raymondsung99 says he saw a recent Google job posting for an ASIC designer. If Google wants chip designers, it's doing something with hardware.

And one more idea: Will Google be part of Steve Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone? In a Reuters report that Google will not do hardware, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster gives and interesting quote: "We believe Google is working with, not against, Apple in the mobile world." A Google-Apple collaboration would be an interesting announcement, probably blowing Microsoft's acquisition of Tellme out of the news waves.

Remember, Sergey loves Apple and has promised that we'll see some collaboration between the two companies.

And never forget that Google is dedicated to cheap or free access to info. The Google phone -- and probably the iPhone -- will give us direct-to-internet calls and searches. When you use Tellme's phone, you have to pay the cellular provider for all that data transmission time, which gets very expensive.

Google is still in the running.

Donna Bogatin Watch: Microsoft outmaneuvers Google in mobile

ZDNet's Donna Bogatin has a decent summary of why Microsoft bought Tellme, a hot startup once considered a strong IPO candidate. Tellme has a head start in voice searching on cell phones, and Microsoft was smart to buy it.

Donna starts off by pointing out that Google has already told analysts that it faces “formidable competition” from Microsoft. That statement's a non-entity. Everyone knows Microsoft should not be underestimated, because it knows how to stick to a market until it gets it right. And Google is borrowing a page from Microsoft's old strategy -- do everything you can to keep the stock price down. If you fail to meet analysts' expectations, you take a big hit and lose credibility.

And I would not yet count Google out in this category.

Web Ventures conference

I'm sitting in a Marriott in San Mateo today at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference. My plan is to file some reports for Conferenza, a blog-style site that reports on tech conferences of interest. But in the meantime I thought I'd list a few highlights.

First, my overall impression.

This is a place where entrepreneurs give 20 minute pitches to an audience of VCs and each other. In the  heady days of the dot-com boom, VCs with bulging pocketbooks roamed the halls and meeting rooms to find companies they could give their cash to.

These days the conference is much too sedate. There are no more presentations with VCs overflowing into the halls to listen to the pitch. The VCs are still here, but speak on panels where they're tossed softball questions by conference organizers and put people to sleep. At the end of the day a panel of VCs is supposed to talk about some of the companies they've seen, but no one declares winners or highlights any more, and few of them even mention and presenters by name.

I don't know that this indicates that the companies are duller so much as the fact that VCs are no longer tripping over each other to hand out their money. Pundits keep claiming there is a lot of opportunity out there for VC-funded companies, exemplified by such ear-popping valuations as Google's price to buy YouTube. But the sense of excitement just isn't there.

The conference is still well-attended. A VentureOne researcher gives some statistics on venutre funding today. Panelists include people like Chris Alden from Six Apart, Kent Lindstrom from Friendster, Kim Polese from SpikeSource, and Anke Audenaert, a VP from Yahoo. There are VCs from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Venrock, Softbank, Redpoint, Accel and others.

But just seems ... slower. There are a few private discussions at corner tables around the hotel, but no crowded hallways filled with excited buzz. The panels would benefit from a little antagonistic questioning by an acerbic journalist to liven them up. I don't see any excitement that indicates companies are getting funded here. But I'll let you know if I hear of any.