2009 26
Now the Fonera 2.0 uploads your pictures to Flickr or Picasa
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
In this video I show how the process works. It works the same way as the Youtube uploader and the soon to be deployed Picasa uploader. You create a folder called flickr in a pen drive, you put your pictures in the pen drive and when you take out the pen drive from your computer and stick it in your Fonera 2.0 wifi router the Fonera automatically sends your pictures to Flickr in private mode. All this while you do something else in the computer.
The Fonera 2.0 will go for sale in Europe for 49 euros in mid April.
And in this set you will see family members acting as photo shoot models for the pictures that were uploaded.
2007 13
Dopplr launches at LeWeb3
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Dopplr, the service that to allows you to share your future travel plans with a group of friends, has finally come out of beta and is now open for anyone to join. The company, in which I invested, officially launched at Le Web in Paris, the conference organized by my friend Loic Le Meur (almost 2000 participants this year!).
Dopplr is a simple and very useful tool for frequent business travellers: it enables connections and coincidence reminding you of friends and colleagues who live in or will visit the cities where you are going to be.
The service is easy to link with most online calendars (via iCal and RSS) and social networks like Facebook. One of the new features is the mobile version (m.dopplr.com): from any device with a web browser members can add trips, see coincidences, future travels and where their colleagues and friends are.
Dopplr’s founders are: Lisa Sounio, Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Dan Gillmor and Marko Ahtisaari, my friend and advisor to FON, is a founding investor.
2007 11
Facebook vs Myspace
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Web 2.0 with No Comments
2007 6
Moneytrackin’ improves its website
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Investments with No Comments
Moneytrackin’, created by Victor and Albert Martin, who work at Fon Labs in Barcelona and in which I am an investor, redesigned its brand and launched together with the successful existing features, a new online social network for people who want to do “social accounting” for common ventures like start ups, graduation trips, etc.
Below you can find the press realease with the new changes and features.
Thanks to the new website, users can continue to manage their personal accounts, but now with an easier and more usable interface, and they can also join the moneytrackin’ community. The community acts as a “wikipedia” for money saving, and its members manage all of the community tips by rating and classifying them, add personal tips to save money, upload their pictures and value the best tips which are included in a savings “Hall of Fame”.The new Community also offers a geolocalized tip sevice powered by Google Maps. This tool offers members local tips for saving money based on where they live. For example, they can check for the cheapest gas station in their city or town.
All of the tips are integrated into the personal accounting tool, and the system offers the information for saving money according to the member’s geographic location and the transactions included in the tool. For example, if the member has a monthly expense for the gym tracked in moneytrackin’, she will receive tips related to saving money in gym fees in her city or neighbourhood.
Moneytrackin’ aims to become the saving’s “Wikipedia” thanks to its new community generated input, offering this collective “savings” knowledge to people around the world.
2007 24
My turn on Blogtalkradio
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in MV with No Comments
The Internet is going wild with formats that blend old media with new media. As I write this post I am watching the CNN/Youtube Democratic Debate in which people on the internet ask questions over Youtube. This is just brilliant for all involved and especially a coup for Youtube.
There´s another format that is making it big on the Internet and is Blogtalkradio. Blogtalkradio is a new way of expression that blends radio, VOIP, telephony, and blogging. This new venture is the creation of Alan Levy, my friend and former partner and it has already gathered significant momentum with many top bloggers and non bloggers holding their live sessions at the site. And probably what is most important about Blogtalkradio is that it has also become the long tail of talk radio (you too can be a Howard Stern…).
This Wednesday July 25th at 4pm EDT it´s my turn to try Blogtalkradio out. I hope my blog readers join the live show and call in with their questions.
Update: The conversation in Windows Media format or MP3 format
2007 5
Robots and Communities
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Yesterday I met with Sir Martin Sorrell and we spoke about the incredibly high market cap of Google compared to that of his company WPP, the largest ad agency in the world ($18bn compared with $160bn). During this conversation I came up with an explanation for this paradox that partly explained the enormous market cap differential of two companies in the same field with similar profits. Namely that WPP is a standard company which trades at a predictable P/E. But that there are only two kinds of companies that can achieve sky high valuations and go beyond the traditional valuation rules and those are are companies in the fields of building robots and building communities. Today at CUTEC I presented this idea at Cambridge and it was very well received.
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I was looking at the TV Channels that Loic Le Meur built using the infrastructure of Vpod.tv and I was super impressed at how studio like quality, a one person effort can be. I also built my own TV channel but walking around with an Nokia N80 my channel is not as professional as Loic´s. Most of my films show poorly when blown up to full screen.
This week I ran into Chad Hurley of Youtube at Google Zeitgeist Europe and I mentioned to him my view that while incredibly successful and simple to use Youtube needs certain improvements to keep growing at its frantic pace. These are going multilingual, going live and greatly improving its editing tools. But talking to Chad I realized that his vision, (and who can prove him wrong as he has built the fourth most popular web site on earth?), is to keep things simple and massive. So so long as Chad is going for the Microsoft approach to video my take is that there´s room for a few Apples to grow. I have been investing in some of them as I see them very complementary to Fon the company that I founded and manage and in which Google and Skype are my investors.
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2007 23
Twitterholic posses
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Web 2.0 with No Comments
Have you ever wondered who the most successful Twitters are? Well I did so I asked my developers at Fon Labs to help me find the answer and they sent me to Twitterholic. Twitterholic basically measures your posse. It was there that I found out that some of my friends were in the leading group including Eduardo Arcos, Loic Le Meur and Enrique Dans. I was also interested to see how many parodies are in Twitter, namely people who say they are Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, and how successful those are.
For many years now I have worked with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, probably the two best investment banks in the world. These two banks helped me financed my previous start ups. But for the two capital rounds of FON I did not work with them, nor with any other investment bank. FON raised a total of 28 million euros with a first round of 18 million and a second round of 10 million for, and we did it all ourselves. Investment Bank disintermediation in the case of FON is probably due to two reasons: one personal, one less so. On the personal front after having raised funds for Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com and other companies I created, it is easier for me to go out and raise funds on my own. But in general I think that investment banks left the start up scene in 2001 never to come back.