We had our Board of Directors meeting of Boomerang at the Lago di Como, which is near Milano in Italy, during the last week-end. Fantastic :-) Great strategic meeting and discussions, great people, great company.

Thanks to Manu, Chris and Christophe to integrate me for now more than 4 years in the Board. The contact with these guys is *very* enriching, I tell you. As Alex (CFO of BioXell, an Italian biotech company, phase IIa, which already raised over 70 m€) and Pancho (Associate Professor of Strategic Management at EM Lyon), who are in the Board too. Below a picture of us in Como. Left to right: Alex, Manu, Chris, myself and Christophe. Pancho was physically missing this time, we had him by tel.co.

As you can see, the atmosphere is very cool, not prim, but *very* brain-intensive ;-) Como is, as so many people tell, a great place. Combination of an old Italian city + the lake + the mountains + the food (pasta, gelato, pizza, mozzarella di buffala, etc.). I recommand you definitely this place.

Como’s cathedral.

Lake of Como.

Do not forget (as I ;-) to update your version of Firefox. The release 1.0.4 corrects three critical security vulnerabilities:

• Privilege escalation via non-DOM property overrides
• “Wrapped” javascript: urls bypass security checks
• Code execution via javascript: IconURL.

It seems that Rodrigo and Mihai have a very tough time in Cannes for the film festival :-) They are organizing a blog coverage of this event, quoting Rodrigo:

Well it’s all happening on the glowria.fr/live blog ! We’re covering the Cannes Film Festival with a team of 10 people, blogging live anecdotes, backstage events, parties, breakfasts, film screenings, etc!

We’re even doing a street marketing event where we’re handing 30,000 flyers to all on-lookers with the help of 3 absolutely lovely hostesses. What for ? Hey, we’re allowing anyone to post a picture to photo@glowria.fr, or send an MMS or an SMS and be published immediately on our blog.

Update: oups, sorry, I’ve forgotten to say that they are actually doing some viral marketing for glowria :-)

[via Seeing Both Sides]

A post from Jeff Bussgang who was attending at the Microsoft’s annual VC conference. Interesting how Microsoft is changing/evolving in some areas.

• The enterprise software business model is dead. This is refrain many VCs are mumbling to each other lately. Price pressure is incredibly intense between open source, Microsoft moving up the stack, vendor consolidation, IT buying wariness, the ASP model, overfunding in interesting sectors and many other factors. It used to be that you could build a profitable enterprise software company at the $15-20M threshold. But with today’s pricing pressures and high cost of sale, it seems to have jumped to $40M, and it’s harder to reach that threshold quickly. VC appetite for standard enterprise software appears to be dwindling to nothing.
• LAMP cost of ownership vs. Microsoft is a myth. This is a new acronymn that I learned today. It stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP – all open source components that are eating away at Microsoft’s value chain. Microsoft firmly believes that they are right on the facts and losing a perception battle with their core developer community – and need to fix this, fast.
• Microsoft is no longer the Big Bad Wolf. Believe it or not, Microsoft feels downright warm and fuzzy lately to a VC. It used to be that VCs would complain that investing is software is dumb because Microsoft will simply build it and give it away for free. Nowadays, you hear much less of that. The law of large numbers has settled into Redmond’s decisions. If a business is less than $1 billion in platform revenue potential, it’s not interesting enough to warrant Microsoft’s attention. Therefore, there are plenty of multi-hundred million dollar software segments that Microsoft is thrilled to help young companies build (on top of their platform, of course). Also, Microsoft’s IP strategy is now all about aggressive cross-licensing rather than offensive litigation. This company has really grown up over the years.

Update: Jeff (Clavier) also posted about this event. His summary differs in some points with the one of Jeff Bussgang. Some of his insights:

Microsoft major core bets are: software development platforms, information navigation & integration, communications, entertainment, security. Ballmer also commented on the critical nature of patents, and how Microsoft was often spending more money on buying or creating patents than developing the actual technology. And they will spend $6B in R&D; this year. A few areas of growth perceived by Microsoft:
– Windows: Software Assurance, Premium functionality, Music, Security
– Information Worker: Realtime Communication, Business Information, License acceleration (read: go after pirated versions of Office), Vertical applications (project management, note taking,…)
– Server: Premium CAL, Management tools, Mid-market functionality
– MBS: Platform for small verticals, Enterprise presence with a large number of vertical solutions
– Home Entertainment: Xenon – XBox 3, TV platform
– MSN: Search, Content, Mail/Instant Messaging, Storage

Rodrigo is giving us (hey it was time ;-) his thoughts about different entrepreneurship’s themes and the “ingredients of good business” he is looking for as a VC:

• the entrepreneur and his team
• the market size
• barriers to entry
• the pain of market you are solving
• the financial structure

Some good insights here, have a look.

My final word: building a business is a very old idea. It has one simple rule: you must sell what you buy with a profit. The question we must all answer next is: how big a profit?

Short overview on the 4 Internet big-players. Impressive…..

Amazon

– founder: Jeff Bezos
– created in: 1994
– presented in 7 countries
– number of employees: 9’000
– profitable since: 2003
– IPO: spring 1997
– revenues 2004: $5 billion, net income: $430 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $12.6 billion
– available cash: $1.15 billion
– some record figures: during last Chritsmas, in one day ==> 2.8 million orders, i.e. 32 orders per second!

Yahoo!

– founders: Jerry Yang, David Filo
– created in: 1994
– number of full-time employees: 7’600
– profitable since: 2002
– IPO: April 1996
– revenues 2004: $3.5 billion, net income: $839 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $49 billion
– available cash: $3.8 billion
– some record figures: 165 million users

eBay

– founder: Pierre Omidyar
– created in: 1995
– presented in 33 countries
– number of employees: 5’700
– profitable since: 1996
– IPO: September 1998
– revenues 2004: $3.3 billion, net income: $778 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $42.2 billion
– available cash: $1.2 billion
– some record figures: 430 million products available on eBay, 147 million users

Google

– founders: Larry Page, Sergey Brin
– created in: 1998
– number of employees: 3’000
– profitable since: 2001
– IPO: September August 2004
– revenues 2004: $3.2 billion, net income: $400 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $61 billion
– available cash: $2.5 billion
– some record figures: 200 million search requests per day

I like really very much this gadget from Nextway, with a incredible geek-name, the “D Cube NMP-612T“, a kind of quite impressive all-in-one device:

• MP3/WMA player, ID3Tag support

• MP3 decoding : MPEG1 layer3 (32-320Kbps), MPEG2 layer3 (8-160Kbps)
• WMA decoding : (32-192Kbps)
• MP3 encoding : (8-256Kbps)

Some reviews:

• TechCentral
• mp3-player (in German)

[via BetaNews]

In the absence of an offering from Sun, the Apache Foundation will begin a project to create open source Java for desktop computers called “Project Harmony.” Citing broad community interest, the project will create a version of the Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) runtime platform that is compatible with Sun’s Java.

The project is possible because Sun changed the licensing rules for J2SE 5.0 and liberalized the Java Community Process.

Project leads stressed that the project is not poised to compete with Sun, which has opposed efforts to open source Java due to legal considerations. Project Harmony will be compatible with Sun’s standard specifications and compatibility will be ensured by licensing and testing with Sun’s TCK, which is available free of cost to non-profits.

Apache’s efforts will be monitored by a code auditing process that will make certain that legal problems do not occur. Developers from Kaffe and Classpath, makers of open source virtual machines, will contribute to Harmony.

Commenting on the project, Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice president, wrote in his Web blog, that “Apache have always been a strong supporter of the Java compatibility program and I’m glad to see that they are emphasizing that commitment to compatibility as part of the Harmony project. Compatibility is one of the bedrock values of the Java community.”

“The licensing rules for J2SE 5.0 were carefully designed to allow independent, compatible open-source implementations of the J2SE specification,” added Hamilton. “Personally, I am not entirely sure if the world really needs a second J2SE implementation, but at the same time I am also glad to see that all the effort we put into getting the rules and the licensing issues straightened out is actually proving useful!”

Sun has said that it will participate in the project in some way. The Apache Foundation welcomes the involvement of any interested parties and has encouraged dialog within the Java community.

Thomas should be proud of that study, Denmark is Number one. A good argument for one of his last post :-)

Interesting free study (pdf, 281kb) from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

A country’s e-readiness is essentially a measure of its e-business environment, a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities.

[…] The e-readiness rankings are a weighted collection of nearly 100 quantitative and qualitative criteria, organised into six distinct categories measuring the various components of a country’s social, political, economic and of course technological development.

[…] E-readiness is not simply a matter of the number of computer servers, websites and mobile phones in the country (although these naturally form a core component of the rankings), but also such things as its citizens’ ability to utilise technology skillfully, the transparency of its business and legal systems, and the extent to which governments encourage the use of digital technologies.

The 25 first countries:

[via vowe]

Interesting.

IBM has scared customers by making too much noise about unproven technology. And though they are now trying to paint Notes as a part of Workplace, it may be too late. I know that IBM can come up with numbers of how successful they are doing but I am unphased. BPs I talk to are not seeing interest in Workplace in the SMB space. The enterprise sources I have do not paint a different picture. Smaller ISVs are asking whether it makes sense to release a WP product as there is no customer demand.