Alternativas para la sesión virtual de coaching con @dimdim que no funcionó

Adjuntamos copia del email enviado a los emprendedores inscritos en el primer intento


Estimados emprendedores

Sentimos el retraso de este email pero hemos estado haciendo distintas pruebas con DimDim y herramientas alternativas. Finalmente hemos llegado a la conclusión de que DimDim es la mejor opción para una sesión virtual pero dado que no se puede garantizar su funcionamiento es probable ofrezcamos la opción de "asistir al plató" a aquellos que esteis interesados.

Agradeceríamos marqueis en el siguiente enlace vuestra preferencias en este sentido, son sólo dos preguntas:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=p_2bsMFOB3R9exSeVHtf6OIQ_3d_3d


Muchas gracias

Luis Rivera
luisrivera@okuri.es

El movimiento "open"

Seth Godin acaba de publicar un listado bastante exhaustivo en su blog de las distintas variantes que están permitiendo construir un futuro mucho más transparente añadiendo su habitual toque de humor

• open source : a program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. If a car goes open source, then you're permitting others to copy your engine and body design, improve it, put their improvements back into the pool and share some more.
• open infrastructure: Amazon's cloud is an example of this. You build the pipes and allow people to rent them to build their own systems on.
• open architecture: A system (hardware or software) where people can learn how it works and then build things to plug in to extend it. The IBM PC had an open architecture, which meant that people could build sound cards or other devices to plug in (without asking IBM's permission).
• open standards: relying on rules that are widely used, consensus based, published and maintained by recognized industry standards organizations. It means that you're not in charge, the standards guys are. Bluetooth is an example of attempting this, so is USB.
• open access: APIs that make it easy for people to get at the data on your platform (twitter is a great example, so is Google maps.)
• open video: the combination of a p2p platform, open standards, free to share and open canvas.
• open canvas: when your platform permits users to express themselves. Wordpress and Squidoo come to mind.
• open book: this is a form of management in which all your employees see all the books, thus bridging the gulf between management and labor.
• open sesame: the best way to get into a cave.
• open mike: when anyone who shows up can be part of the show. I guess the difference between this and open canvas is that this is more linear. "Who's next?"
• open forum: users comment, rate and rank. Digg and Zagat's come to mind. We could probably divide into the approaches that are more social (Chowhound) and those that are less (Yelp).
• open door: simple method to allow individuals speak truth to power. Getsatisfaction is one example.
• open engagement: when individuals in power are available to all comers for questions and answers and dialogue.
• open bar: the alternative to a cash bar. You pay one fee and then get all you want. In a world where selling is more expensive than delivering (things like bandwidth) this makes more and more sense.
• open borders: your data is portable and you can walk out with it at any time. Amazon has closed borders (your history stays there) but OPML is open borders for RSS.
• open elections: when anyone can vote, not just the elites, or registered users, or those that pay.
• open house: allowing prospective buyers to walk around inside your product before deciding to buy.
• open sauce: a company talks about its business methods publicly to build a brand. For example, Fred Wilson talking about how he invests or DUI blogger talking about how to beat a breathalyzer. (HT to Alex).
• open to all: the opposite of a country club. A trade show or meeting or event that doesn't work to screen out attendees.
• open identity: A protocol for carrying your identity from site to site, at your discretion.
• open interaction: when previously private conversations (like customer support) are handled in public (via Twitter, for example).
• open and shut: the kind of answer you rarely get.

Post en Seth's blog

Entrepreneurs can change the world

Grasshopper acaba de publicar un video motivacional como parte de su nueva campaña de servicios de oficina virtual para emprendedores americanos que creemos merece ser visto



Grasshopper

Propuesta para financiar start-ups de TAG

Carta abierta de Robin Klein, socio de The Accelerator Group, destinada a que reformar el modelo de financiación semi-pública de start-ups y el problema del equity-gap. Las negritas son nuestras

Dear Lord Drayson,

Put £100,000 into 10,000 startups - not £10m into 100!

There has been a lot of chatter about the Government’s apparent initiative to make £1bn available for innovative early-stage companies.

Apparently, Lord Drayson, the Minister of Science and Innovation in the Department for Universities and Skills is driving this. The BVCA is keen to promote the idea through its influential contacts that this money should be channeled via the large established VC funds.

From where we sit, putting lots more money into the large funds achieves the exact opposite of what I understand the desired the objectives to be.

What is urgently needed in the UK - in order to promote entrepreneurship and encourage innovation - is funding at the very earliest stages.

One of the major drivers for Silicon Valley’s success has been the readily available, quickly raised seed capital. Its not uncommon, even in today’s funding climate to find start-ups funded with $500K in a matter of weeks by angel syndicates led by an agile tech VC.

There is more than enough capital available once companies have proven their technologies, validated the market need and have real momentum. This capital is NOT venture, it is development or growth capital.

The so-called funding gap has never been adequately filled and the growth in size of the leading funds has forced them to move up the food chain and to back relatively fewer pure start-ups.

We have all been wringing our hands at this gap for many years and in the current environment the gap is noticeably widening.

Seed funds are extremely difficult to make work effectively on the classic 2/20 model since it is important that seed funds invest in a large and diverse portfolio (in order to find the winners) while at the same time need to provide a lot of hand-holding to these companies (implying a larger organisation - more partners).

The BVCA’s position is interesting in that it looks at the whole issue from the ‘industry’s perspective’ – you can’t blame them for that – its their job. It’s certainly not being looked at from the entrepreneurs perspective!

We at TAG have had terrific support from some of the large tech VCs but their ability to do many seed fundings is very limited. We need healthy and growing seed capital partners to join us in our quest to find and nurture the next world beaters.

One of the most important and effective vehicles for promoting entrepreneurship in the tech arena in recent years has been Seedcamp [Interest declared: TAG has been an investor in companies promoted by Seedcamp - Editor] - the flood of applicants and the rising quality of these applicants attest to the strength of innovation emanating from Europe.

They are deserving of far greater financial backing.

Robin Klein

Partner, The Accelerator Group (TAG)

PS: TAG is an early stage technology investor with 43 investments currently in its portfolio. We invest actively mainly in the UK but also across Europe and in the US.

Artículo en Techcrunch

Followup en Techcrunch

Propuesta para "salvar" el modelo de Venture Capital

Parece que el lobby americano de empresas de capital riesgo dedicadas a start-ups empieza a proponer medidas

The National Venture Capital Association , the lobby group for venture capitalists, declared a state of emergency for venture-backed startups today and announced a four-pronged plan to revive their chances of going public .

NVCA 4-Pillar Plan to Restore Liquidity in the U.S. Venture Capital Industry

View more presentations from NVCA.

Large banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have long dominated the process of taking companies public. They each typically demand a 40 percent cut of the multi-million dollar fee a startup must pay bankers in order to go public. (The banker fee is roughly 7 percent of an overall IPO — giving banks $7 million for an IPO worth $100 million). The big banks typically allow a 20 percent sliver of that fee to go to a smaller investment bank, even if that bank has done more work to win the business. VCs will no longer stand for that, Dixon Doll, the NVCA chairman (below left) told me in an interview this morning. Smaller banks need a decent share of proceeds because they’re the ones who take time to do research about small companies. Without these boutique banks, startups will go unnoticed and never get any love from IPO investors.

(...) But now, with the financial industry in the gutter, this threat by big banks to withhold support has lost credibility. “If the big banks say no,” says Doll, “you just don’t use them. They’re very hungry for business, so they’re very unlikely to say no.” He added that the NVCA will push VCs to work with founders to force the issue, encouraging them to vote to assign smaller banks to handle a larger share of the IPO “book-running” syndicate.

Artículo completo en Venture Beat
Presentación en Slideshare

Fracaso de la primera sesión de formación virtual

Lamentablemente la tecnología no estaba a la altura y tras resetear tres veces nos hemos dado por vencidos. Adjunto copia del email enviado a los participantes

Disculpas a todos por los fallos que no han permitido realizar la primera sesión de formación virtual. Lamentablemente las pruebas que habíamos efectuado habían sido con un número menor de usuarios, aunque esa explicación es tan buena como decir que se ha colado un gremlin en las máquinas de DimDim.

A lo largo de los próximos días vamos a hacer "pruebas de carga" en herramientas alternativas para que podais ver el video + presentación de la charla y dispongamos de un entorno virtual donde interactuar. En cualquier caso, y dado que a día de hoy la tecnología no sea suficientemente fiable para estos usos, buscaremos una sala apropiada para la sesión para ofreceros una opción presencial "en el plató".


Muchas gracias por vuestra paciencia

¿Mañana se decide el futuro de Internet?

Como dirían los americanos, todavía estais a tiempo de escribir a vuestro "congressman"

This is a call for direct action. You just have to fill in this form and your message will reach automatically to ALL of the Europarlamentaries of your country.

The Web as we know it is under serious threat. The new laws of the European Union ("The Telecom Package") that is intended to be passed on May 6th, would allow internet providers the legal capacity of limiting the number of Web pages you can see and to decide if you are allowed or not the use certain services (like the P2P networks, the VOIP phone services, like Skype, or any other service they consider less profitable). The new Law would allow the providers to offer people connection-packages like TV packs with a limited number of options. That means that your Internet access will be limited depending on the packet you have signed for and you won't be able to access to all pages, just to those included in ypur packet. Furthermore, under these laws they could filter pages and contents and survey your activities in Internet without any guarantee. To have a more detail vision of these things visit:

http://www.laquadrature.net/en

http://www.blackouteurope.eu/

We can still stop it with a massive delivery of emails before the May 6th. We have already sent more than 375.000 messages, but we need to reach one million emails. The few Europarlamentarians that are fighting to save our freedom and net neutrality have supported our action and call for more emails been sent. Only their inboxes full of messages from citizens can stop this madness. Don't wait more, take 5 minutes to defend your freedom. Ask them to vote for ammendment 46 (the old ammendment 138) that guarantees our freedom.

Tomorrow might be too late


Post completo en Hacktivistas

Grupo de Net Neutrality en Facebook

¿Llegan a alguna parte las start-ups del iWeekend?

En Techcrunch el viernes publicaron un análisis de las start-ups que han salido de startup weekend, la versión original del iWeekend, y arroja conclusiones bastante pesimistas; sólo un 10% de las empresas parece seguir activo y no hay grandes hits a pesar del bombo mediático.

The results so far: only 12 out of the 116 startups (approximately 10 percent) launched after Startup Weekends held from July 2007 to April 2009 can still be considered active, and 35 out of the bunch (approx. 30 percent) are currently offline. Most of the projects carry the ‘idle’ status, which means there have been no visible changes to the service for a certain period of time (...)

A priori un 10% no parece malo porque es frecuente que sólo una de cada 10 inversiones en fase semilla tengan éxito, pero la estadística es bastante peor dado que "activas" no implica "rentables" y mucho menos "éxitos". ¿Supone eso que el start-up weekend es un fracaso? ¿Son distintas las estadísticas del iWeekend?

Despues de apoyar en la organización del evento en Madrid y tras un par de reuniones con los responsables de Tusiyu, en Okuri Ventures somos plenamente conscientes de la limitación del modelo, pero aún así creemos el análisis no refleja toda la historia

• Intentar levantar un negocio en un fin de semana permite aprender muchas cosas, evidentemente la experiencia no es comparable a dedicar tu vida a una start-up pero el coste de oportunidad se limita a un fin de semana.
• La experiencia de networking te permite conocer a potenciales colaboradores en condiciones similares a los case studies con los que Harvard revolucionó las escuelas de negocios y muchas de esas relaciones fructifican, el análisis no cubre cómo afectó el fin de semana a los demás proyectos de los participantes
  
• El potencial de 50 personas bien enfocadas, aunque sólo sea por un breve espacio de tiempo, es tremendo si se aprovecha correctamente. Con la mentalidad adecuada todo proceso es mejorable, sobre todo si de documenta
  

Luv Sayal y Miguel Angel Ivars aportan una respuesta mucho más contundente anunciando una nueva edición del iWeekend.

Poco más de un año del iWeekend de Valencia en el que se puso en marcha el proyecto Pidecita este evento de emprendedores regresará a la ciudad los días 5, 6 y 7 de junio. En esta ocasión para la puesta en marcha van a contar con el apoyo de Valencia Emprende, CEEI Valencia, BBVA Open Talent, Sun Microsystems y la Secretaría de Estado de Telecomunicaciones y para la Sociedad de la Información.

Puede que el iWeekend no sea perfecto, pero creemos es una experiencia francamente recomendable para todos los potenciales emprendedores o personas con curiosidad sobre el mundo de la start-up interesados en pasar un fin de semana en Valencia.

¡Mucha suerte a todos!

Web iWeekend
Post en Techcrunch
Post en Loogic