What is the perfect hosting environment for early stage entrepreneurs?

GigaOm and PEER 1 will bring together leading industry strategists and technologists to debate the perfect hosting environment for early stage entrepreneurs as the hosting market evolves towards an on-demand model.

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Be sure to join the live webstream Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 9:30AM PST.

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Sounds to me like Tesla is going public. Here is some coverage on the topic from The GreenBeat blog at WSJ Online.

“Rumors are swirling today that Tesla Motors is seriously considering an initial public offering sometime soon. The talk has been tracked to two anonymous sources, who say the six-year-old company could cash in big on the battery-powered car trend before electric and hybrid models from companies like General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan make it to market.

Tesla has officially denied the prediction, calling the IPO chatter “rumor and speculation.” That said, going public in 2010 would give the San Carlos, Calif. company several distinct advantages. First, it would solidify its position as the electric car player to watch. It’s already been casually anointed as the leader by industry observers and the Department of Energy, which granted it $465 million in stimulus funds in its first round of low-interest loans for advanced transportation projects. Second, it could use the sale to raise money to get its hotly anticipated Model S sedan out the door by its 2011 due date.

Tesla is one of several cleantech companies anticipated to go public as soon as next year. When A123Systems shocked the market with its blockbuster IPO in late Sepember (its share price jumped 50 percent on opening day), many analysts, including the Cleantech Group, said that the biggest public offerings in 2010 will probably come out of the green sector. In addition to Tesla, solar system maker Solyndra — which received $535 million in loan guarantees from the DOE in March — and smart grid communications provider Silver Spring Networks have also been named as likely candidates.”

Read the full article here.

GigaOm also covers this topic saying:

“Last Friday, buzz about an imminent IPO for electric car startup Tesla Motors hit the Interwebs, courtesy of two anonymous sources familiar with the plans who spoke with Reuters. As in several previous stories about its possible plans for a public offering, the company has declined to comment.

But if and when Tesla goes through with its long-discussed goal of going public, it could be the biggest and possibly the first public offering for a U.S. car company since Ford Motor’s IPO more than 50 years ago. The event will also offer a glimpse at the role IPOs will play in the nascent green car market — is the classic venture capital model (invest early and find a big exit in the form of an acquisition or an IPO) viable for this sector, or will a green-car IPO be more about feeding big capital needs and branding?

Hopes for a Google-like moneymaker in cleantech (Google took only $25 million in venture capital to make millionaires of 1,000 employees and billionaires of its two co-founders in a wildly successful IPO) have already started to fade for some in the sector. Stephan Dolezalek, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, which has invested in Tesla, told Reuters in September that public offerings now serve more as “financing events” for alternative energy and other cleantech startups rather than a way for investors and founders to cash in on equity.”

Read their version here.

Continuing on with the theme of News junkie or the future of journalism? I now want to take a look at the Business of Blogging.

24/7 Wall St has recently published a list of The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs In America.

7 of the Top 25 most valuable blogs are tech blogs.

TechBlogs, as we all know, are an extremely competitive part of the online content business so it will be interesting to see how all that “Free Market” energy translates into Advertising Revenues and, more importantly, a return on Shareholder Investment.

Note: Important qualification. The top 7 most valuable tech blogs do not correlate with the 7 most popular tech blogs.

 They estimate the annual advertising revenues and monthly traffic for each of these Top 7 Tech Blogs to be:

• 5. TechCrunch. $7.5 million. (4 million uniques / 18 Million Page Views)
• 9. Boing Boing. $4 million. (3 million uniques / 24 Million Page Views)
• 12. GigaOm. $2.8 million. (1.7 million uniques  / 12 Million Page Views)
• 15. ReadWriteWeb. $2.4 million. (1.2 million uniques  / 10 Million Page Views)
• 16. The Business Insider. $2 million (1.8 million uniques  / 14 Million Page Views)
• 18. Apple Insider. $1.3 million.(1.2 Million uniques  / 8 Million Page Views)
• 20. SearchEngineLand. $0.6 Million. (0.4 Million uniques  / 3.5 Million Page Views)

Interestingly these figures indicate that the market leader is the least sticky (4.5 Page views per unique) while the 7^th spot is the stickiest (8.75 pages per unique). You’ll notice is there is no correlation between revenues and traffic. I guess the question also has to be asked how many of these uniques end up visiting all 7 blogs each month?

The average revenue per unique per annum (ARPU) across the top 7 sites is just $1.55. It doesn’t get much better at the top of the market. ARPU across the top 3 is just $1.64. While top spot delivers an ARPU of just $1.875.

So that’s the revenue side. Now let’s take a look at what it cost to run a top 3 tech blog. 

24/7 Wall St  suggest you will need around 30+ staff to generate the volume of pages each day to keep the blog hot and the ads streaming. So let’s say for arguments sake you need 30 people and that fixed cost per staff member (including the equipment and associated operating costs) is $100,000 per annum. So that would be an estimated $3 Million per year in costs. This means 2 out of the top 3 may be making money.

Based on these estimates TechCrunch makes an operating profit of just $1.125 per unique per annum.

So let’s put this into perspective. There are an estimated 130 Million Blogs on the web of which about 8,500 are TechBlogs (at least based on Technorati’s listings) and of the top 3 tech blogs the ARPU is just $1.64 and the top operating profit is just $1.125 per unique per annum.

A couple of thoughts come to mind here. Not least of which is Chris Anderson’s Long Tail prediction for media: “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”

Pardon the pun but I guess these figures make the business of profiting from blogging a Long Tale.

The other thought is this. Clearly blogging isn’t where they make their money.

So what do they do to make it work? Well SearchEngineLand, Gigaom and TechCrunch all have conference programs linked to the blog. For example, they estimate that SearchEngineLand’s conference revenues are 3-4 times that of the revenues generated by the site. So clearly the blog is just a Freemium hook to get new business in.

You may recall that in an earlier posting What If: Journalism is the real reason Newspapers are dying? I made reference to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and his mid-year post on What If: The New New York Times . In this post he redefines The New York Times online publish model in terms of the TechCrunch blog model.

Now let’s apply some MobCon theory to this whole Blogging Business and do a What If on the TechCrunch blog model.

What if: Instead of talking about iPhones TechCrunch went into business selling or even giving away iPhones to their 4 Million + readers? What would their revenue model look like then?

Well their ARPU would take a huge bounce. Up from $1.88 per annum to upwards of  $800 per annum. Their margins would also improve.

They would grow their annual revenues from$7.5 Million to $3.2 Billion. This would make TechCrunch’s revenues slightly higher than the New York Times. Why shrink to greatness after all?

In Australian terms this would make TechCrunch a bigger mobile telecoms provider than the newly merged 3 Mobile and Vodafone Joint Venture.

Now let’s apply the same logic to the New York Times. What if they also became a mobile publishing company? Issuing iPhones, or any other brand of smart phone, to their online audience and print subscribers? What would it do to their revenue model?

The New York Times, whose online business in 2007 had an ARPU of $3.80, has 10x the traffic of TechCrunch so they would quadruple their revenues and solve the original New York Times10% Problem.

Just for the record: Estimates put The New York Times offline ARPU in 2007 at about $330. Hence the 10% Problem where 10 times the readers online delivers 1/10 the revenues.

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If you find any broken Tweets or Links, please report them in the comment section.

If you like what you see, may I recommend you start following me on Twitter to enjoy the benefits of real-time content as it materializes.

If you choose to follow @rlavigne42, please leave me a comment. I will make sure to check out your Tweets in return.

If you see a Tweet you appreciate, please Pay it Forward by ReTweeting it.

If you find an blogger you like, please Join Me in following Them.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

We just read an article by Om Malik about a growing segment of iPhone App users that Flurry terms, “App Addicts.”

According to Flurry, an App Addict is someone who uses an app three or more times per day or more than 100 times per month. We don’t support addiction, but given how some people are using Mobile Receipt, they may need to talk to someone.

Image from Flurry Analytics

Our suggestion? Embrace your use.   Or better yet, icnrease your efficiency with the app, which would free up time to try another one. May we suggest Mobile Phax?

You’ve probably heard of the old expression: There’s no such thing as a free lunch! Well today that’s apparently no longer true.

Earlier this year Wired’s Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson, wrote an article and then published the book called Free.  (You may recall that I mentioned last weekend that Chris was presenting the idea at ycombinator’s Start Up School).

Free is all about a business model called Freemium.

The idea that giving away free product is not only good marketing it is a great way to build an online business.

The general idea is to give all or part of your product or service away for free, with or without the support of advertising revenues, and then offer these new customers the chance to step up to a newer, improved model (at a price) later on down the road.

In marketing parlance you are in the business of  creating a network of product champions - and where you have champions then loyal customers will follow.

The idea of using a free sample is not new to advertising and promotional professionals. It has long been recognised that free offers is one of the most effective ways of attracting a market. The only better way is through word or mouth – but Advertisers don’t really like to talk about that one too much for obvious reasons.

Nor, as Fred Wilson has pointed out, is Freemium a new idea in software circles. Many profitable software houses have been built over the past 2 decades using the shareware model.

Om Malik at Gigaom and Andrew Chen have both provided some invaluable advice on how Freemium can be a great way to bootstrap a start-up web business.

You should also take a look at Freshbooks. The Canadian based Freshbooks is one of the great Freemium startups of recent times. Here in his recent post milestones to cross before raising venture capital  Mike McDerment, the CEO and Co-Founder of Freshbooks, provides some advice and insight for budding startups looking to bootstrap their idea into a business.

Freemium, of course, represents something of a paradox for tradition Venture Capital thinking. The pyramid below illustrates how difficult it is to get the market to pay for a new innovation based on the Big Problems Small Solutions scenario we discussed in the much earlier post: Don’t think Strategy: Think like a VC!.

The VC Investment Pyramid

The general rule of thumb in VC circles is it is always easy to get customers to pay for information about the problem (think: Magazines then Conferences) than it is to get customers to pay for the solution (think: Industry Reports, Management Consultants or Specialist Training and then Product).

The Freemium paradox says quite simply you don’t need to pay for any of these steps. It’s all available for free.

As Chris Anderson says…

The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

So life on the web is just a free lunch.

The question is: Is this model sustainable over long term?

Think of a future today where you launch your brand new web 2.0 site or iPhone App for free thinking that in 6 – 12 months time you’ll be able to launch a better subscription version to your newly acquired market of Free Champions.

However, when the time comes to launch the new improved version you discover that 10 maybe even 100 other bootstrap startups have now launched their new Freeware offering and it is has more features and benefits than your paid offering.

What is going to happen to your Free Champions? Do they stick around or do they move on? Do they go in search of the next free lunch or do they start paying you for the free lunch you have already provided? What do you think?

The reality is Freemium is a game of diminishing returns as each new entrant has to offer the industry benchmark just to gain traction with the Influences and Free Champions.

Today software developers are discovering that, if the database is the new media, then applications are the new content.

Applications are fast becoming fashion items, disposable and of limited lifespan. This means developing software apps today is no longer about changing the way people do business but about tapping into how people see and project themselves.

This means, although they don’t know it yet, software companies and their developers are now facing the same crisis that is afflicting newspapers and their journalists.

If this really is the case then it is only the customers’ data that offers us a true measure of the value of the Freemium business model. – And the value of that data all depends on how much it reflects where the customer has been, how much it reflects where the customer is going and how much the customer need access to it tomorrow.

So if your thinking about investing your time, energy and money into a  Freemium business think Data First because, after all is said and done, functionality is just the hook to get the customer in.

Further Reading:

• Why putting ads on the menu won’t pay for lunch
• This is how you make money out of a free lunch!

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TECHNOLOGY

Roku, the company whose set-top box originally made it possible to stream Netflix content on TVs, has come out with two new video players. The Roku SD supports standard-definition content of 480i and costs about $80; the Roku HD-XR supports 702p video and retails for $130. Digital Trends(10/27)

By 2013, there could be as many as 46 million homes worldwide with 3-D-capable TV sets, according to GigaOM Pro analyst Alfred Poor, who added that the rate of uptake would be greatly affected by cost considerations. Sony and Panasonic, both of whom have said they will launch 3-D HDTVs next year, are likely to lead the way. Yahoo!/The Associated Press (10/26

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If you like what you see, may I recommend you start following me on Twitter to enjoy the benefits of real-time content as it materializes.

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Okay, I am not sure that I would need this service but check out GoogleVoice. On the google blog you can read more about how to keep your existing phone number and still take advantage of neat features like call recording, call screening and getting text messages via email. You can subscribe to Google Voice with your existing mobile number OR with a Google number. Watch the youtubes to see all the bells and whistles. The catch? You have to be invited. Visit the site and request an invite.

via: Josh Spear, via: Gigaom.com

Lately, there’s been a reoccurring discussion around social networks in the workplace. While some say “no way,” others are embracing some of the potential benefits to the social nature of various platforms and having employees gathered in an online community.

Today, Jennifer Martinez at GigaOM wrote a post -”Social Network Use in the Office Could Spur Better Enterprise Technology” – that focused on how allowing workers to use various social networks could spawn better social applications that could increase communications and productivity within an office.

Taking it one step further, Josh Green, CEO of Panjiva – the leading information source on global manufacturers – recently contributed “Trust your teams, not the crowds, when it comes to risk” at VentureBeat focusing on how internal collaboration and looking within at your own employees is where you can find important information and answers (specifically around risk management and the supply chain). He referenced a J.P. Morgan’s risk management system – VID – from the past that was basically the first to look internally and give untapped employees a place to collaborate and provide answers rather than outside sources.

In summation, both Jennifer and Josh’s pieces highlight how social networking or collaboration among employees can lead to business benefits otherwise unknown.While this concept might not be considered “new,” social networking is giving the enterprise a new way channel for employee collaboration and innovation.

Keep tabs on how social networking continues to evolve in the workplace. While major platforms like Facebook and Twitter might not be the most appropriate, other applications and platforms will begin to pop up to help businesses work more efficiently and tap employees for innovation and answers.

Ο Jon Lily, CEO της Mozilla, σε συνέντευξη που έδωσε στο GigaOM στα πλαίσια του Play conference,του Πανεπιστημίου του Berkeley, ανέφερε ότι η Mozilla έχει ετοιμάσει μία εφαρμογή που θα κυκλοφορήσει στο App Store[next]