Buzzwords in a newly released product this morning:
Yes, it’s reportage!
(I’m sad there’s no mention of Facebook, that’s also a buzzword these days)
Fred Brunel has a teaser and an introduction about Reportage on his blog
Reportage works with the way you already tend to use Twitter; by firstly, scanning for the avatar of people you care most about and then browsing for second tier interest people.
We’ve leveraged the ability of your brain to quickly recognize faces, especially on precious mobile screen real estate that’s unsuited to scanning a long timeline.
Reportage focuses on people. Instead of having a single timeline, Reportage shows you the most recent activity in a wall of avatars. Then, you can cherry pick who you want to listen to first — pretty much like with the tuner of a radio receiver.
Martin Dufort and Fred Brunel are also doing interesting developments:
San Francisco is a cold and windy place this year. Even though O’Reilly’s European conference got canceled, attendance here is visibly reduced. There are fewer booths, fewer attendees, the parties offer a little more room to breathe than a year ago. We were still technically in a recession last year, a year of record attendances, but that was before we figured it out ourselves and helped tell the world (and our customers) about it.
But what the event lost in numbers, it more than made up for in content. The Web 2.0 Expo this year is all about business. Gone are the underwear gnomes, the flower children, and the googly-eyed hopefuls holding in diffident shame (or convoluted PR) the idea of wanting to make money. People come here with a revenue strategy, not to find one. They want to shorten the prototyping cycles, discover the customer sets offering them the deeper revenue streams, achieve visibility, deliver faster, and lower costs. Even the old euphemisms are gone: “Monetization”, the ultimate after-thought, dissipated in thin air and is barely heard of any more. Money is not in the mind last, it is clearly there ahead, as a way to sustain one’s primary dreams and ambitions of offering the best value out there. People here say what they want to say with pride: “I want to do good” and “I want to make money.”
Quirky Twitter is a business tool, and it now wants to work on Scala rather than Rails. Agile is being reworked. Vendors are here offering SDKs, not promises: eBay and PayPal offering a share of their revenue stream; Palm Pre is courting mobile devs; Windows Mobile Marketplace offering a 70% revenue share in 28 countries from the start. Mozilla is offering new, better cost-efficient ways to build software. “If you want to rebuild this economy”, they say, “we want to be partners”. The VCs are still holding court. People come up with products and services that they can reliably offer their users in sustainable ways.
I like that.
I think this is the best year so far.
Xobni, a startup offering a power plugin for Microsoft Outlook, announced last week 2 major news: their software is now officially out of beta, after 10 months of beta-testing, and the Blackberry Partners Fund has added $3.2 million in their series B round. The main investor remains CISCO, which puts in $7 million.
See original article about the Blackberry Partners Fund on MTW
Xobni was an original Y Combinator startup, with the goal of adding social features on top of outlook, as well as quick search. A Outlook user could then see the connections and history with other coworkers and any other email receivers.
Xobni received a fair amount of buzz; First Round Capital and Koshla Ventures came in then for the series A. Last year, there were rumored to be negotiating for a straight acquisition by Microsoft, up until Cisco came in to led series B.
The Blackberry Fund has announced other investments, such as Neuralitic Systems recently. Compared to Neuralitic though, an obvious connection could be made between Xobni and RIM. One could think about a mobile application; but if the key advantage of Blackberries is email, I don’t see any other way for Xobni’s future than to be integrated into the Blackberry OS. There’s potentially the behavioral aspect of a “mobile Xobni”, since delving through a correspondant’s data sounds impractical on the go, but that doesn’t seem like a challenge the Xobni team can’t solve.
Congrats to the guys at the Blackberry Fund, both in Montreal and Toronto!
Number of the day: 58 millions mobile phone subscribers now in France, with 1 million having 3G access. That’s a penetration rate of 91.3%, while Canada is at 51.3%62% (last stats from cwta.ca). So one could think:
Neuralitic Systems, a company which provides marketing insights for operators and mobile service providers, has announced a $3m investment from the Blackberry Partners fund last week.
The company also raised additional funds from Vertex Capital, BDC Venture Capital, and Go Capital Fund in the past 4 months, in a total of $10million.
See this post for more info about the Blackberry fund.
Neuralitic allows mobile carriers and service providers to know exactly the behaviors of their users and how they use data-based services. This would be useful especially to the likes of Bell or Telus to craft Blackberry and Windows Mobile offerings, although I am not sure how it could be used by other platforms, such as Android or the iPhone, since the latter two has taken away the “packaging” role of carriers, with this being done now by Application stores.
Airborne and iNovia Capital announced last week a $2million financing round.
Airborne is a Montreal tech company producing mobile tools and applications, with a very diverse product line, from games, SMS apps, to wallpapers, ringtones and mobile marketing tools.
The financing round by iNovia Capital has been presented by both companies as a renewal, after Airborne’s executive team “restructured and refocused” the company, with the investment presented as the main driver now for future growth. Chris Arsenault of iNovia, who has worked previously with Airborne’s founders, also joins the board of directors.
While it’s great to see a VC firm like iNovia support local tech companies, in a booming market (mobile), it’s noteworthy to see that Airborne Mobile has been around for 10 years. It’s a relatively “safe” investment, in a company which is almost a service provider, akin to GameLoft; not a startup with a product. Airborne also stated that more custom games and applications for niche markets were planned for upcoming months, but I haven’t seen references or objectives for promising platforms like Android, the iPhone, or the Blackberry.
The first edition of the CWMF was held on Thursday in Montreal. We were 200 business people with a strong interest in wireless management and in wireless innovation. I see in this event as well as in the recent Rogers data plans drop the possibility for Canada to remain a place where wireless world leaders can exist/grow.
Iain Grant kicks ass. Canada just ahead of Guyana.
Iain got everyone to laugh when he mentioned Canada’s peer group in term of mobile penetration. Nevertheless 2008 has seen a significant drop in data plans. And the new entrants should lead to a voice plans drop. Not much to expect for business users yet.
Neuralitic Systems has announced a $7 million funding from Vertex Venture Capital, an Israel-based venture Fund, as well as from BDC and Go Capital Fund, to fund their expansion.
Neuralitic makes SevenFlow, an analytics software that allows telecom companies to see how wireless data access is consumed by their customers. Neuralitic states that since “voice revenues are flattening”, carriers are flocking to wireless data to maximize their revenue per subscriber. Neuralitic can then help carriers understand what their customers really wants, and ultimately offer them the appropriate application & service packages.
As Mark MacLeod points out, it’s all happenning in Montreal. iNovia Capital also announced 2 days ago a “multi-million” dollar investment in Nanoledge, which will be relocating to Canada. I’ve heard that things are not so rosy down south these days, but as far as I’m concerned, everything tech is booming in Montreal. (see this, this and this)
OZ Communications, a very successufl mobile communication software provider, announced tuesday that they were being bought by Nokia, and they’ll integrated into their Nokia Services & Software division. Since OZ is a private company, details of the deal were not disclosed, and we’ll have to wait until Q4 2008 to see the amount paid by Nokia.
Apart from OZ’s diverse array of mobile messanging software, its most valuable assets is its relationships with mobile carriers across North America and Europe, with 5.5 million paying users.
This is very good news for OZ’s founders, and for any other mobile software upstart in Montreal, as you can’t find any better exit than an acquisition by Nokia, the leading mobile company in the world, with a proven track record for innovation, and will still be the heavyweight in the room even if there are new contenders. Alternatively, you could wonder if OZ could grow and become a Fortune 500 company without Nokia, but they would have had to reinvent themselves, such as developing for the iPhone or the Android platform instead of their business model with carriers.
The question also remains if the OZ engineering team is to stay in Montreal and become a Nokia R&D center (I’m crossing fingers) or they’ll be “shipped” to Finland. Either way, I hope we’ll see the existing talent(s) at OZ starting new ventures in Montreal.
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