nextstop - more cool stuff from Google alumni

"Why do ex-Googlers start such interesting companies?" asks ex-Microsofter Robert Scoble.

...and then it dawned on me: because Google sets out to hire those people who are likely to set up interesting companies when they move on.

The point is not that Google somehow creates people who do cool stuff. It's the other way around. People who do cool stuff want to work at Google because it has a reputation for letting people do cool stuff. Meanwhile, Google is looking for these cool-stuffers, precisely because they can and want to cool-stuff.

When these cool-stuffers get up and leave Google, they go off and cool-stuff with some other ex-Googlers. Is Google unhappy about it? Of course not! Everyone looks at ex-Googlers and says "wow!" The reputation of the ex-Googlers is part of the Google recruitment toolkit.

[Hint: there's a lesson in there for start-ups]

So what is nextstop?

According to the blurb...

nextstop is a community of people who love to discover the world around them. We enable members to exchange short, positive recommendations for the places and experiences they love most, and through this collective effort, are building a rich repository of information about the best things to do that spans the globe.

Sounds like a ton of other companies out there like Qype, Yell, trustedplaces, Trip Advisor and all their pre-cursors like Lonely Planet, Fodor's or Bradt Guide. But it's a little different: "we're a place to discover new things to get out and do wherever you are".

The approach is different because it works a bit like a search engine. The homepage has a Bing-like feel to it. You type in the place you want for recommendations and whoomf! you're carried across to a whole bunch of recommendations relating to it, in thematic categories, with keyword filters etc.

Is there space in the crowded market for a new take on an old (very old) concept? Perhaps not. I know from talking to the founder of one of the companies I mentioned above that revenue is very hard to come by. Nothing wrong in itself with entering a market where there's proven demand.

Updated: Orange launches startup competition with NESTA #OSCR

How does one of the world's biggest mobile telecoms companies, with 180,000 employees worldwide, remain innovative in a market that risks becoming commoditised?

This is the challenge that Orange is facing and why today they launch the OSCR ("Oscar") Project at NESTA's headquarters in central London.

Back in the 90s, Orange was the quirky mobile phone company that launched with the inspiring tag line "The Future's Bright, The Future's Orange".

Then, about ten years ago, they were acquired by Mannesmann of Germany, which in turn was bought by Vodafone. The EU Commission then forced it to divest Orange and France Telecom ended up the eventual owner.

Orange has a multitude of venturing programs. The OSCR project is a way for Orange to tap into the creativity of the UK tech scene, to develop services for great customer experience in order to deliver significant revenue back to Orange, all the while protecting the IP of the companies taking part.

Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Product Marketing at Orange, gave the example of Orange Wednesdays as one of the ways in which customer relationships are strengthened. Orange is looking for other similar cross-platform (mobile/web/TV) services that develop communities, enhance messaging or offer personalisation, amongst other opportunities.

How it works

In a nutshell, companies have until next Friday 12:00 AM on 6th November to submit an application in response to the brief. The applications are then reviewed, not by Orange, but by a third party 'Trusted Agent Team' consisting of NESTA, live | work and Wireless Innovation.

Ten days later, five to ten companies will be selected to share in £100,000 to prepare to pitch to Orange. The companies will then work with Orange over the next 90 days to determine whether a commercial partnership can be agreed.

After that, well, the future's bright.

Full details of the programme, including slides and videos from today's launch event will be available on the OSCR project website as of tomorrow.

Kevin Rose: How to go from 1 to 1,000,000 users

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, gave a talk at FOWA on getting users to adopt your web app. Here it is in full:


Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Live @ FOWA in London (thenextweb.com)
• FOWA: The 2009 Web App Survey Results Are In (techcrunch.com)
• TC50 Backstage: Kevin Rose on What's Going Right at Digg, What Went Wrong at Pownce (techcrunch.com)
• 4 Questions For Web Entrepreneur To Think On (As Answered By Kevin Rose - Digg Founder) (streamxy.com)

It's the little things

As though there were some force out there trying to guide me, two links from Twitter in quick succession today urge me to keep an eye out for the trees, while planting the wood.

Nic Brisbourne's blog frequently gets me thinking. He's a partner at VC fund DFJ Esprit, which has investments in companies like LoveFilm, so you'd expect him to have wise words to say. Today, he was writing about the need to be fast, good, cheap and something more. He concludes with a reminder "to absolutely sweat the small stuff".

Someone Once Told Me is a cool website set up by Mario Cacciottolo, a BBC journalist. The concept is simple: each day there is a photograph of someone holding a sheet of paper with some words of wisdom someone once told them. Today's SOTM is "It's the little things in life... they are the BIG things".

On the other hand, it would be equally good advice to say, keep hold of the vision - don't get hung up on the details. How often do I hear the encouragement to launch a product before it's ready?

There is a tension here and it's important to sustain it, I believe.

Fastest Five Risers and Fallers in European Tech

For a while I've been staring at TechCrunch Europe's Top 100 chart. Powered by YouNoodle, this chart suggests which start-ups are hot and which are not. See the TechCrunch article for an explanation of how it works.

The Hot Handful

1. Monitise (35/100, up 14.6). Set up by a highly experienced team, London-based Monitise claims to be the world's leading mobile banking and payments partner. Founded by Alastair Lukies (CEO), formerly co-founder of epolitix.com, and Steven Atkinson (CTO), who has held senior positions at Vodafone, Informix and the MoD.

2. Spotify (76/100, up 9.4). Needing little introduction, this music-streaming darling of the digerati has been shooting up the chart recently, following news of the $50m investment by Wellington Partners and the Li Ka Shing Foundation. It's still below Deezer, it's French counterpart, separated by just 3 points.

3. SoundCloud (56/100, up 8.2). German SoundCloud is an online platform for music professionals to collaborate, promote and distribute their music. The company raised €2.5m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures earlier this year.

4. Distimo (15/100, up 7.1). Founded just this year in the Netherlands, Distimo provides analytics for mobile applications, across app stores. They are generating good media coverage with a clever PR strategy, including producing reports on the state of the mobile app sector. Although at the lower end of the league, Distimo is the fastest mover in percentage terms (up 89%).

5. Playfish (88/100, up 6.1). Second in the TechCrunch Europe league, London-based Playfish is one of the top creators of free games for players to interact and compete on social networks.

The Cold Clutch

1. Adconion (41/100, down 23.6). The biggest mover in number terms, Adconion Media Group is a performance-driven online advertising network. The company had a great year in 2008: it ranked second by comScore's global ranksings; and pulled in an $80m Series C round from Index Ventures and Wellington Partners. According to YouNoodle's algorithm, 2009 has been harsh.

2. Scoopler (15/100, down 14.3). Scoopler is a real-time search engine for discovering what people are talking about on the internet right now. It's in an exciting but really competitive space. $15,000 seed funding from YCombinator is unlikely to be enough to win against Google's own efforts. It's score has halved and it struggles to make the cut.

3. Joost (44/100, down 11.5). There's nothing new to be said. Falling from a great height, Joost proves that great founders are not a sufficient condition for a start-up to succeed.

4. Badoo (85/100, down 10.3). UK-based badoo offers standard social networking features and allows it users to pay to make themselves more popular across badoos network. Although slipping ten points, badoo is still in the top ten TechCrunch Europe rankings. With a steady 750,000 daily unique visitors, it can't compete with the scale of the major social networks but it's revenue model might deliver a decent profit.

5. Dailymotion (86/100, down 10.2). Paris-based dailymotion was supposed to differ from YouTube by virtue of including professional content. Not so anymore. The last two years have seen its traffic halve from 3.0m to 1.5m. But don't write it off yet. It remains one of the top five European tech start-ups.

Reversals of fortune are frequent so I'll be revisiting the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 from time to time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index (uk.techcrunch.com)
• The Benefits of a Classical Education (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)
• LeWeb Startup Competition Partners With TechCrunch Europe (uk.techcrunch.com)
• The Europas 'Best Web Apps' Finalists & TechCrunch Top 100 Index (jimdo.com)

Is lack of funding good for UK startups?

Image via CrunchBase

At the TechCrunch London event this week, coinciding with Seedcamp Week, Wil Harris of Channel Flip made a comparison of the US and UK fund-raising scene. He showed that it really is much easier to raise money in the US, which we all knew.

Then tonight I came across a blog post by Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs. He says:

There is TechStars, Seedcamp, Extreme University, Launchbox, YCombinator, etc who all invest around $20k in each group of founders and provide a great deal of support and connections for around 3 months.

Only one of these is European.

Seedcamp is one of the best things to have hit the European tech scene but being the only one of its kind, I wonder if it isn't trying to fill too big a hole on its own. The prize for the five or so winners is seed-sized funding with three months of the best mentoring this side of the pond.

The competition to get the exposure that Seedcamp promises is so great that the companies that are being accepted into the final 20 for Seedcamp Week are now well-advanced. Erply, an Estonian ERP business, according to TechCrunch, already has 200 paying customers in four markets and is at break even. On that basis alone (admittedly scant details), this business is ready for a Series A round.

Meanwhile, on the US side, Bootup Labs instead of focusing on getting businesses seed funded, they invest $150k and give them 8 months to get their company to at least "ramen profitable". It's not easy to get in but they take six companies, three times a year.

Erply is beyond this stage but has had to fight for a smaller slice. While success at Seedcamp might now attract the real funding it needs, other seed-stage startups have not jumped over the high barrier to entry with such tough competition.

There are probably some real benefits for tech start-ups to grow up with a need to keep the purse-strings tight. The classic case of a dotcom without financial restrictions, boo.com, ended up blowing all $135m of its funding and died while owing suppliers tons of cash.

The difficult funding environment, I hope, will force startups in Europe to seek out excellence in execution, so much so that they will grow up to be formidable players. My fear, however, is that too many opportunities will be still-born. The US continues to encourage failure on the road to success. It seems that in Europe we are still so hung-up about failure that we force companies to fail before they have any chance to prove themselves.