Jargon Watch

GAMEY - Google, Apple, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo!. VC-speak for the group of companies expected to buy up the creme of Silicon Valley start-ups. Thanks to CNN Money.

Generation Cash - Generation Content getting paid through sites like citizen journalist photo agency Scoopt, and video sites like Revver, eefoof and Flixya splitting ad revenue. This content for cash game has gone mobile; mobile operator 3 pays video creators per download through its SeeMeTV initative and MyNumo rewards the creators of ringtones, videos and wallpapers through a revenue share approach.

The concept also extends to the black economy trading on eBay and those people operating as part of the Fon wi-fi network and the big cash prizes offered by the likes of Intel and Netflix for customer-generated innovation. It's Alvin Toffler's prosumer concept made good. Thanks to Trendwatching.

Size 0 works for me

OK so the title was a poor play on the controversy over skinny models on the catwalks, but I wanted to share this product with you.

Logitech the Swiss-based maker of computer bits from mice to iPod accessories have purchased Slim Devices; makers of some really cool looking digital media centres called the Squeeze Box (which looks like a grown-up version of Sonos) and the Transporter (the network media player pictured) for some 20 million USD.

The guts of the box is based on open source software that enthusiast users have modified and enhanced. Kudos to VentureBeat.

Tales from the gathering bust

Sevin Rosen have picked up some unfair stick (look at some of the comments here) about the way that they have cancelled their latest fund, preferring to hold out rather than participate in unprofitable investment opportunities currently doing the rounds.

Whilst some cite it as the company losing its mojo, the also freely admit that the tech sector has become quite frothy, the seem to think that this can be avoided with smaller targeted fund investments. The problem is that there is a finite amount of good investment opportunities.

A lack of exit opportunities was also cited by the company as a key factor in their decision. There have been too many pension funds and their managers burned in the dot com and telecoms busts in the early noughties.

Graphic courtesy of the New York Times.

Jargon watch

Capture
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Calling in rich - When the partner of a business has enough money and doesn't want to work any more they are said to call in rich.

It can be very difficult if the business hasn't succession-planned for the departure.

Generally it refers to the founders of technology companies, but I have known a partner in a hedge fund to do this.

Kudos to A VC.

Second Chance Tuesday - amend your diaries

Shu Uemura
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

At RC towers we got an email from the organisers of Second Chance Tuesday which has been postponed until early May.

From: Glasshouse Events
Date: 16 March 2006 12:15:34 GMT
To: events at theglasshouse.net mailing list
Subject: RE: Second Chance Tuesday - New Date 2 May 2006


In a change to the published date, the next Second Chance Tuesday will be held on Tuesday, 2 May 2006. Full details to announce the opening of registration for the event will follow shortly. We will also be announcing details of new sponsors and plans for development of SCT events throughout 2006. We truly apologise for any inconvenience that the date change may cause. We promise not to make a habit of moving event dates and we will publish future dates well in advance.


We have been overwhelmed with the response to the last Second Chance Tuesday and hundreds of people have been joining the mailing list each week. We would like to thank all of you who have been in touch to give us feedback on the last event and some new ideas for the future. Please do keep the suggestions and ideas coming, we are looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible on Tuesday, 2 May 2006. If you have friends or colleagues who would like to join the mailing list please ask them to visit. www.secondchancetuesday.com.

With very best wishes

Judith Clegg & Michael Smith

Second Chance Tuesday part two

I managed to get along later than I'd attended to Second Chance Tuesday. I was surprised by the formality of clientele at the event. I had expected the usual monied suits, but the entrepreneurs where where suited and booted as well.

There were precious few PR people (with only Adrian Chitty and Simone Carr on the registered list), but then not using PR and marketing is seen as a badge of honour amongst the boot-strapped Web 2.0 set.

A couple of the people that I'd met:

Rob Eberstein of i-Zebra thinks that push technology is now finally ready to arrive almost ten years after the initial promise and non-delivery of PointCast. Universal broadband access, faster cheaper computing and storage being the key facilitators. Watch this space once the fall out of stealth mode some time in April.

Caroline Teunissen of Vividas PLC told me about their streaming video product which is platform-agnostic being based on Java. At first when I heard about it, I was reminded of the Compound Document concept of the early and mid 1990s (the most famous use being the CyberDog web browser for the Mac). Both player and stream are transferred to the client device at viewing time. I am reliably informed by my friendly web maven that the quality of the video streams even when viewed on a 20" monitor at full screen compares favourably with against competing products.

Second Chance Tuesday

OK, so this is not for those of you who think that Web 2.0 is drinking the last chance saloon.

First Tuesday was a networking event whose name became a lightning rod for all things dot.com. The idea was to put together dot.com entrepreneurs, interested third parties (like PR agencies hungry for business) and venture capitalists in the same room to socialise, exchange business cards and hopefully be the genesis of a number of fruitful business relationships.

First Tuesday grew into a monster, the London meetings were held in big cavernous venues like Fabric nightclub in London. You can check out their broken site here.

Anyway the nice people at The Glasshouse have resurrected the format in a homage to First Tuesday with the catchy name Second Chance Tuesday. More details on the first London meeting here.