2011 22
Failure has to be accepted, but not encouraged
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
Tonight in Paris, at dinner with @loic @geraldine and @ninavarsavsky, we spoke about attitudes towards failure in USA and Europe. In Europe it’s still terrible to fail and that is bad because failure is an essential part of success (think of all the sperm that fail to make a child). But in Silicon Valley, failure is becoming too much of the opposite: too accepted, people are not trying hard enough, too many start ups are getting funded as if VC’s knew there were bound to fail but went ahead anyway. In Europe now we are more like in Silicon Valley in 2006 when Fon got funded. Back then it was not that easy to get started. And that may not be all that bad. Failure has to be accepted, but not encouraged!
2011 20
Wayra: Telefónica’s start-up accelerator
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
A couple of weeks ago, Telefónica announced the launch of Wayra, a program that will support the creation of high-tech IT companies in Latin America and Spain. Basically, Wayra is a business incubator, although it wants to be more than that and calls itself a business “accelerator”. (Future) entrepreneurs can submit their projects, even if they’re only at an idea stage, and the 30 teams with the most promising ideas will be given the opportunity to present in front of a jury which will then narrow the selection down to 10 projects (this occurs on a country level). The first three countries are Colombia, Mexico and Spain, and the goal is to have this initiative running in eight countries by the end of this year. This will bring the number of supported projects to 80 by the end of 2011.
Every project will get access to Telefónicas top-notch technological infrastructure, and in addition will receive financing of $30k to $70k during the first six months and will obtain all the necessary support needed to establish and build a successful company (office space, mentoring, day-to-day management, technical support from Telefónicas R&D department, etc.). Wayra will also help the most interesting of these projects to obtain additional financing after the initial six-month period.
The idea behind this project is to facilitate the creation of global tech companies out of Latin America and Spain, which, despite some great successes like MercadoLibre, is still very difficult. Many potential founders move to tech hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, London or Berlin because they can’t find the necessary environments needed to create and grow an international company in their home countries. Access to capital is difficult (especially finding “smart money”), it’s hard to find skilled employees and the overall environment (legal, etc.) is often not supportive of entrepreneurship.
Wayra’s mission is to plant the seed from which local “Silicon Valleys” can emerge over time in the target countries, enabling talented individuals to pursue their dreams without having to leave their home country and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. A great initiative, I am looking forward to seeing the first projects emerging from the program.
2011 19
Are you thinking of moving to Silicon Valley? Think again
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
What follows is my talk at IE on why European and all non US start ups may not want to move to Silicon Valley, at least not the whole company.
Martin Varsavsky at IE Venture Day from Martin Varsavsky on Vimeo.
2011 18
Why say that Osama was unarmed?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Micro with No Comments
I don’t understand why the Obama administration had to say that Osama Bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed, that he was not threatening the life of the soldiers who were in the compound. Why feed the terrorists with stories that they can use for recruitment purposes? Why not just say that he died in the operation without giving more details than that?
Terrorism is an industry and its main input is angry young men. USA has to realize that certain moves, like Abu Gharb publicized pictures, Guantanamo tortures, air bombings in Fallujah, killing of thousands of innocent civilians in the search terrorists in Afghanistan, and now saying that Osama Bin Laden was unarmed, all these are the stories that feed the terrorists at their key moment, recruitment.
If the purpose is to disengage with terrorism USA should not make it easier for terrorist recruiters to get new people who hate USA. Al Qaeda’s life used to be much harder when all they had to say was “The infidels are in the holy land so let’s go and murder thousands of them when they go to work”. Let’s fight them without giving them arguments to multiply and grow. USA should study the many terrorist movements in Latin America and Europe that ended up completely extinguished. It was not revenge that did it. It was careful management of public opinion combined with effective police and judicial efforts. While my preference would have been to put Osama Bin Laden on trial I can also agree with those who said that capturing him would have made terrorists do all sorts of hijackings and threats to public safety. But if that is what drove the administration to decide to kill him, then why decrease public safety by confessing that he was murdered and making terrorists even more angry?.
2011 18
Spotify vs. Rdio – and the winner is…
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
I have been using both Spotify and Rdio for quite some time now. Following the recent rumors that Spotify will launch in the U.S. this year, I felt like writing a detailed comparison between the two products based on my experience so far.
While broadly speaking the business model is the same, my impression is that the general approach of both companies is quite different (I am friends with the founders of both companies and a small investor in Rdio but I hope this does not affect the objectivity of my post). Rdio seems to have built a music streaming service around a social networking core. Spotify’s core is music streaming, offering social features on top. You notice the difference at once when you log into the desktop application. Spotify’s home screen shows you new releases and a news feed that combines information from Spotify with activity in Facebook. On the left side you can immediately access your playlists and start listening. Log in to Rdio on the other hand, and almost everything you see is based on the activity of your social network in Rdio. You see the songs that have the most “heavy rotation” in your network, you have a feed of recent activities of your network and you see the artists that are most popular among your network. What Rdio tries to do is create your own music listening community very much like Runkeeper creates your sports community.
In general, Rdio has a much more social graph feel than Spotify. You can follow friends and other people Twitter-style, find friends with whom you are connected on existing networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.), get recommendations for people and influencers to follow and find out more about your own followers or the network of people you are following. It’s also possible to see which users have been listening to specific artists, albums or even songs. And you can write your own reviews on an album and artist level. You can also see how often a specific song has been played, and you can browse through other people’s libraries or playlists based on certain songs/artists/albums they have in their collection. Rdio’s charts also integrate some of these features and feel more complete than Spotify’s. All of this is really great for discovering new music provided that you actually have a network of friends in Rdio which is what so far is lacking because of the relatively small size of the community compared to Spotify. Now this is the case in the countries in which Spotify is active. But in USA Rdio has an advantage over Spotify which has not launched there yet.
Spotify is much more like iTunes. From the above list of features, Spotify only supports Facebook integration and users can only subscribe to individual playlists, but they cannot follow other users like as they can with Rdio. I read somewhere that Spotify is much more “track-oriented” than Rdio, and I agree. Your search results consist of a long list of individual tracks, also if you search for an artist. Rdio arranges search results into four categories: artists, albums, songs and playlists, and people. This is neat, but also more time-consuming if you know what you’re looking for and just want music to start playing right away. Spotify is much more no-frills, but more intuitive and way faster.
In terms of speed I found Rdio to be rather slow and unresponsive. It’s possible that this happens to me because I am in Europe, where Rdio is officially not yet available. But for whatever reason this interferes with the music listening experience. On average, it took about 5-10 seconds for a song to start streaming. This also happened when navigating through the desktop app, which uses Adobe Air and is web-based. Spotify’s proprietary P2P software is a huge difference. Everything is basically instant, there is no noticeable delay between the time you click on a song and it actually starts playing (when streaming). Also scrolling through a song feels like having it on your hard drive.
Check out this detailed comparison between the iOS apps of Rdio and Spotify. I prefer Spotify, but as with most things this boils down to a matter of taste. If you have Shazam on your iPhone or Android, you can now also play found songs directly by hitting the “play with Spotify” button.
What’s really cool and useful is that Spotify now allows you to manage your iPod directly (but not the iPod touch), bypassing iTunes entirely. And even users of the free app (see the embedded spreadsheet below) can now use the mobile apps, but only with tracks they actually own (no streaming).
Importing your existing tracks is a huge advantage of Spotify: you can add your own tracks to the player, even if they are not in the Spotify catalogue. As mentioned above, you can then sync them easily to your mobile device (over the cloud) and listen to them anywhere, also being offline. Spotify supports many different music formats and can also complete missing track information automatically, due to a partnership with Gracenote. Rdio can only match your iTunes collection, and if they don’t have the rights for a song you can’t listen to it with Rdio.
Spotify wants to replace all your existing music players. And for me, it does. I can have all my music in one place, everything is synced over the cloud with any device I might use, and it’s super easy. In addition, the audio quality of Spotify is great, especially if you have subscribed to the Premium service (up to 320kbps). There have been some complaints about Rdio’s audio quality, but I didn’t experience any problems in this regard. Another advantage of Spotify’s longer existence and large following are the many web goodies, which are resources/apps built around Spotify, like playlist sharing sites, remote control apps, music discovery, etc.
Conclusion: so far Spotify is clearly the better product. It has all the features you need, is super easy to use and very fast (no delay in streaming songs) and it can really replace your existing music players. You can import all your music files, even those that are not in the Spotify catalogue, and sync them to your mobile devices.
Maybe Rdio is simply overloaded with too many features that are nice to have, but not essential. Of course they will be more relevant as Rdio’s popularity increases and more of your peers start using the service. But for the time being you have everything you need in Spotify, and it’s super simple to understand and use. Considering the comparably late launch of Rdio, they nevertheless have achieved a lot. But Spotify is still better, at least for me. Another example of why simplicity wins.
Two thing’s I’d like to see in the future for both Rdio and Spotify are an equalizer (doesn’t have to be the full-blown thing, but it should include some presets) and of course a native iPad app.
Lastly I would like to say that Janus Friis is an amazing designer, the man behind Skype and a mighty rival for Daniel Ek, so while Spotify is the winner at this stage this could be a long tennis match with a different result in the next set to be played in USA.
Thanks Merten Wulfert for his help on this post.
Here’s a comparative spreadsheet which complements my post:
Related articles
- Rdio: Bringing Music Streaming to the Desktop (appreaders.com)
- Rdio Taps Developers to Compete in Digital Music Arena (gigaom.com)
My good friend Blake Krikorian just launched his most recent project – R2. It’s an Android app that allows you to control virtually anything that is connected via Crestron (the market leader in automation systems for buildings) in your home or office. How does it work? First of all you need to have a Crestron system installed, for example you could use it to control your lighting, shades, climate, audio, security, and so on. There are tens of thousands of devices and services that can be controlled with Crestron. Once you have downloaded and set up the R2 app, it will then allow you to manage any connected device/function from one place. R2 just needs an Android device and a WiFi or 3G connection. So if you’re sitting in your garden and feel like listening to some music, you just take out your Android phone or tablet and with a few taps turn on your home sound system. You can even control multiple buildings with this app.
R2 is a really useful and fun app. It’s comforting to know that you can control your house from basically anywhere. You could check if the alarm is turned on, switch on and off the lighting system, pre-heat the oven when you’re in a rush, or crank up the music during the day to get even with the annoying neighbor who always throws loud parties during the weekends 🙂
What’s also very smart is that R2 is compatible with Crestron’s existing iOS apps (Mobile Pro and Mobile Pro G), so it runs projects that were originally created for iOS devices, eliminating the need to rewrite the entire app. Crestron-authorized developers can also keep using their existing development tools, which saves them lots of time and will enable them to quickly develop new features that can take advantage of Android’s strengths.
Can’t wait to test this system in my house!
Fring has once more improved the mobile video calling world by introducing group video calling for Android and iPhone. If you have a WiFi connection (e.g. using a Fonera) or a fast 3G connection, you can make video calls with up to four friends simultaneously for free and see them all on one screen. This is useful at a social level but also for people who are constantly on the move and need to hold frequent work-related meetings. Lately I am using video more and more at work and it is saving me a lot on air travel. It’s much more personal to have video calls than only hearing each other’s voices, and you avoid annoying things like people getting distracted or even walking out of the room during the conversation (really, that happens).
I’m very happy that my friend Avi Schechter and his team at Fring keep coming up with great innovations.
Onavo just launched today. Onavo is an iPhone app that compresses the data that goes through your iPhone and shrinks your overall data usage. Onavo can compress data of many services/apps (like Facebook, Twitter, Google maps, web, e-mail and many others) to make your data plan last longer. Onavo is especially useful when you’re roaming, since data costs are still excessively high and Fon, while approaching 4 million hotspots, is still lacking in coverage.
If you think that you don’t need this app since you never roam you’d be surprised to find out that most “unlimited data” plans actually have limits. Onavo can also get more speed out of your connection when you are on EDGE by sending less data with more information. Onavo works as a background service, so once you install it you don’t have to worry about it again. Plus Onavo shows you how much data is being used by each app and how much you are saving. Android and iPad apps will come later on.
Here’s an interview with co-founder and CEO Guy Rosen on TechCrunch.
Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Onavo.
2011 27
How to fight child Poverty, give parents a custodian vote
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
Image via Wikipedia
One of the lesser known facts about democracies is that they tend to skew income against children. In USA for example children are the poorest people in society, children are 26% of the population but 39% of the poor. And this is true of all democracies. This has one simple explanation and that is that children can’t vote. If they could they would certainly vote for what societies seem to lack and that is better care for children. In Europe for example in most countries, kindergarden is incredibly expensive but universities are mostly free. No surprise there as university students can vote and kindergarden students can’t. So I propose a simple solution to this and that is to give one additional vote to parents on behalf of their children. Not a one vote per child as that may lead families with a lot of children to have too much influence in the electoral process but each family with children, one or many, should get one extra vote when election comes. This vote should be exercised by the parents using their best judgement on behalf of their kids. It is my view that if parents got a custodian vote for their children democracy’s outcome would not be so skewed against the young.
Image via Wikipedia
Just had dinner with my friend Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer one of Germany‘s top media and newspaper groups. During dinner we spoke about the future of newspapers, a subject very relevant to him since his company still makes most of their revenues and earnings from them. Indeed Axel Springer has Bild, the largest circulation paper in Europe, it also has the less popular but more informative Die Welt. In our conversation a trend came up that is worth sharing.
While downloading without paying has caused tremendous revenue erosion for record labels and studios, it is the culture of everything on the internet should be free that is hurting newspapers. In the case of newspapers it is not that people copy their content online for all to get it for free. What happens in the print industry is that owners put the content online and the revenues they make on online advertising do not compensate what they lose in print. But that is because the PC is an instrument that has made people used to not paying. While in print content owners can both sell the newspaper or magazine AND make money from advertising very few are willing to pay for content delivered to their PC. People have come to expect that everything that happens in a PC other than paying your DSL/Cable/Fiber provider should be free. But this is a psychological stance. It is hard to understand why this is the case but what is clear is that with other hardware come different habits. So the same is not true of smartphones and tablets. In a way what Apple has done is made people used to paying again both for apps (formerly known as software) and for content through iTunes. And that is also happening with Android both for smartphones and soon for tablets (Android tablets are still not a real contender for the iPad but Android smartphones are for the iPhone). So as people migrate from PCs to smartphones and tablets they will not find it offensive to pay, just like they don’t find it offensive to pay in the Sony PS3, or in Microsoft XBOX. Bottom line is this: if you have content think less of PCs and the web as we know it and more of smartphones, tablets and gaming platforms. That’s where the money is. Or may be. In the meantime Axel Springer is doing a remarkable transformation from offline to online. This migration should be good inspiration for my friends who run the New York Times, El Pais and other newspapers and magazines.
