Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Sharing your digital content online

More and more bloggers are starting to share their movies online (they are also called Video bloggers or vloggers). A number of services have sprung up since early 2005 to do just that:

- typepad: of course your preferred blogging platform allows you to upload any file (including a video) to a post. The RSS feed however points to the post itself, and not to the file

- prodigem: this paltform allows you to easily create a .torrent seeding tracker for any file, and has an RSS feed for new files; it also allows you to monetize your content. [update: I just noticed BoingBoing mentions the service here] Excerpt from their home page:

" We've taken peer-to-peer (bit torrent) and completely simplified the ease with which you can publish your media.  The result is a dynamic new habitat where you can find the  latest downloads or endlessly distribute your content.

Our hosting service empowers your personal broadcasting freedom. And if your intention is to make money, our marketplace is where it's at."

- the Internet archive is another repository for digital content. From their home page:

"The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."

- ourmedia.org is another platform for this as well:

"We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.
Get recognized for your creativity. Make your voice heard. Register now and join the personal media revolution."

- Google just launched GoogleVideo...

and of course all the plaforms allowing people to share content, including all blogging platforms, and all the new collaborative tools from Yahoo 360° for instance.

Quite a trend of services allowing to *store* content. It seems to me that there will be real soon a way to *access* all this content easily through any channels and device:
- Orb is such a first service (we've talked about them already, and so has Russ recently)
- Akimbo is another service that streams digital content to your TV (Orb could take over afterwards)

There will also be a need to *search* through all this content easily in a structured way. Marc Canter mentions often the need for structured tagging of content to enable search engines to work properly.

In the meantime Google already has a special page for searching videos and TV shows (example here for the WestWing)...

Now some people are now creating new "television" channels from this online content, ie recreating a service on top of these streams. The OpenTV network is such an example.

Any of you know of other services out there, work on investment ideas, or care to share thoughts ?

Update: Jean-MiMi posted a very similar note today (after mine I guess ;), and mentions one company I didn't know about: Dave Networks.

Goodbye Microsoft! Hello Skype!

Aha! paradigm shift. This story has been relayed quite a bit on the blogosphere: Lenn Pryor, a former (not yet) senior Microsoft staffer, on the Evangelist team for that matter, is quiting Microsoft, and joining ultra-hot start-up Skype!

He posted on his motives, and I found them to be really frank and straightforward. Enjoy the extract:

"I have a lot to say about both companies right now. Microsoft lost me for many reasons, Skype gained me for many reasons. I will let you draw your own conclusions rather than disparage my Microsoft colleagues or over hype my new colleagues and company. I don't believe in writing diatribes and manifestos when moving on from a job so I will spare you the soapboxing. Microsoft has its challenges, we all know what they are, they are more than apparent these days. Skype has its opportunties we all know what they are, who wouldn't like to see the communication and collaboration technologies in their lives get much much smarter and cheaper?

I decided to swap problem sets from one that I am not passionate about any more to one that I AM deeply passionate about. I just couldn't go on being an evangelist for a gospel that I don't believe I can sing. I am returning to focus on what I enjoy most, building amazing things that make people happy, change lives, and make money. In this case Skype was a better place for me to do this and one that shares my core values and beliefs in how the future of both software and business will unfold."

Lenn, welcome to Europe !

Don't mess with me boy!

Someone stole a laptop from this guy at Berkeley, and from this little movie (Download Berkeley_Laptop_Thief.mp4), he is really, but really, pissed off. Does anyone know how the story ended ?

ps: it's a mp4 file: quicktime reads it nicely.

Update on 24/4/05: BoingBoing has some discussio on on how to protect your data in case it gets stolen. The NSA has security configuration guides for mainstream operating systems and other systems here (example for WindowsXP).

Apple Expo 2005 (Paris): registration is open

Just thought you'd like to know that folks are lining up real quick on this show. You may register for the show + keynote online. It's in Paris, in september.

And the next show for Developers in San Francisco is in June. Early registration is almost closed.

Being on the edge... of the world

Funny blog. I enjoy reading Steve Jurvetson's moblog (you know this guy right ? an early investor in hotmail, interwoven, etc. etc. etc.!). He usually posts large zoom ups of nature details.

Today he gives us this hilarious post. enjoy.

Beautiful crisis communication

I love this post. Beautiful crisis marketing management. And just because of it, I'm getting a FlickrPro account... I also like their tongue-in-cheek approach to their new pricing.

God save America

Deni writes about 'how the extreme capitalism and the rigid decision-making structures may change our life in the future…'.

Another example of what I dislike from the world's hegemon...

I vote yes to Europe - again

I saw this wall yesterday in Paris. Sad that some of the no-team arguments are flawed (ie. Should Turkey enter the EU? they think that by voting no they will stop the process), some are reasonable (ie. the Constitution is not good enough, therefore we should force a new draft, otherwise we'll be stuck for 50 years...).

I still vote YES, as I had explained earlier in this post.

If you are still unsure, Francis Mer, former French Finance Minister and industrialist, has written a short & precise guide to what will change to our continent with this new constitution. It's only 5€, and you should be able to get it everywhere. A must read.

Update on 22/4/05: Fred Humbert points (thanks!!!) to a free online PDF of the book, from the Foundation headed by Francis Mer: you can download it here.

And in the comments, Versac is absolutely right, the report was written by contributors of the Foundation, merely headed by F. Mer, not written by him. (sorry for the confusion). By the way, you should read one of the blogs where Versac contributes regularly, Publius, where many views on the European Constitution are discussed.

The Entrepreneur survival kit

We finally did the right thing: we just got ourselves a new Nespresso coffee machine, the heavy-duty ES-100. Yes! rocks! How could we survive without it ?

So here go my personal recommendations on what you need if you ever start or run a company:
- a fast, very reliable, personal computer, preferably a laptop with a long lasting battery (helpful to take notes in conferences, or to work in the plane) - I have a Sony Vaio and I love it
- a fast, multi-usage mobile phone, with a PDA embedded in it (I have a Nokia 7710, that doesn't fit these criteria, but all the other useless ones ;)
- a heavy duty coffee machine (I use a Magimix Nespresso one)
- a high-speed Internet connection (I use a 20Mb/s ADSL2+ line from Free)
- a backup mechanism (I use both an external DVD burner and 150Gb drive from iomega)

In terms of services and software ?
- a Skype account
- an antivirus (I use Norton Antivirus)
- great browser (firefox) and email program (thunderbird) that you can customize to your needs
- a PIM software : I use Palm Desktop to organize agendas, contact information and to do lists.

And of course, services from RISC Partners, the seed-stage venture capital boutique that I happily co-founded and manage.

Update on 5/5/05: I forgot to mention a key component on this kit: an entrepreneur deserves a break every now and then - avoid overburn. I talk about it here.

I didn't say Skype had a $130m valuation

Two days on the road, and stacks of email and rss feeds to read through.

Surpringly, I discover this morning that one of my nightly posts has generated some comments on the blogosphere, and yesterday a journalist kindly pinged me to comment more on it. Actually, I was posting about why I liked the Skype business so much, and offered a back of the enveloppe calculation of their yearly revenue potential. Extract of my post:

"- market size = well its twice as good here: there are about 900m internet users, and I suppose 99% would have a phone, hence it's a nice market of almost 900m phone users. Imagine an ARPU of 20€/month for telephony * 12 months = 213,8 b$ ! And if only 10% ever get on VoIP, that's still 21,4b$ addressable market. With at 20% marketshare, that's still potentially a 4b$ turnover company. No need for great maths, the potential is there. You would of couse need to adjust that for a percentage of paying customers on Skype (10%), a skype ARPU vs. a normal telco ARPU (x3 ?), and that Skype will charge 10% of telco prices. You get about a 130m$ company. Play with any of the parameters to adjust them to your risk profile."

That is VERY different from assessing what the right valuation should be (I should have written 'You get about a 130m$ company IN REVENUES': to say the least, a DCF analysis would capture a number of additional years of margin plus a terminal value that would include a number of things, including technology, brand, customer base, a set of contracts with telcos around the world. As one of my readers very rightly points out:

"I thought the implication of my post was clear - that $130m might be a ballpark figure for potential of the SkypeOut business alone - but that there was a lot not captured by it, i.e., SkypeIn, licensing revenues, revenue shares, the "option value" of a community this large, and other intangibles. My gut feeling is that a figure 3 - 4 times this might be more appropriate, but that the issue won't be relevant until the business is much bigger and more mature."

He also wrote earlier:

"Rodrigo has had a crack at the answer in his interesting blog. He comes up with a putative figure of $130m, which I work out to be about $130 per SkypeOut customer. The problem is we don't have any way of knowing what the average ARPU per SkypeOut user is. I have spent EUR15 to date, but then again I use Skype almost exclusively to communicate with other Skype users. More intensive users, especially highly nomadic individuals, would probably generate an annual ARPU of $75 without much effort.

All-in-all, if SkypeOut ARPU across the 1m user base was on the order of $40 per user, then a $130m valuation would be slightly over 3x annual SkypeOut revenues. By contrast Yahoo! currently trades on just under 13x prospective revenues, and that's after some fairly savage share price performance in recent days. It is also important to remember that we need to take into account SkypeIn revenues (I am happy to pay EUR10 per quarter for a US number, but I would be surprised if Skype was paying more than $2 - 3 per quarter to supply it), licensing revenues, etc., for which we have no data points to work from - yet. When they become available, we'll be able to put more meat on these bones.

For the record, I have tried to go through official channels to gain more insight, visiting UK Companies House (which maintains financial statements from UK companies), to find that a company known as Skype Limited is somewhat behind in its filings."

But, this sounds like a nice challenge, I'll try to model a right valuation for the company and offer it to you for challenging thoughts (but not now, I'm still in the middle of something else ;). As a matter of fact, I had a great discussion about it and some other things recently with Hans-Jürgen Schmitz of Mangrove Capital Partners, one of the early investors in Skype. The only thing I can tell you, is that there is SOOOOOO much ahead for this company, that...

LOL. Give yourself a treat. Get a Skype account, a SkypeIn number, and start using SkypeOut ;D