At Venture Cocktail #3 I met Adrian from PCU Zurich. He convinced me about the concept of the PCU Network and we decided build up PCU Basel, which we did.
The first step is to meet unregularly to lunches/dinners and see what happens.
If you’re from Basel and an entrepreneur, please join PCU Basel for free. You will receive News via email. The first lunch/diner is planned to be in August or September 2007.
The last couple of days I was using Facebook pretty intensely. Today, I received the latest PayPerPost newsletter and found out about the new PPP Facebook application, which I instantly installed. With the facebook app, you always have your current PPP opportunities directly in Facebook, which I have to admit is pretty neat. The Facebook app is already used by over 300 people.
So scanning the list of opportunities I found the opportunity of writing a review about PayPerPost for $20. So I thought I test-drive our American friends and take this opportunity :-).
PayPerPost pioniered the "paid blogging" industry and got a LOT of coverage. They did a Series A in October 2006 and raised $3 mio. Recently they did a Series B and raised another $7 Mio. They’re apparantly reaching 40’000 bloggers and will do approximately $5 mio in revenue this year.
Their reality show RockStartup is usually pretty fun to watch. I haven’t missed an episode yet:
episode 1: The Setup
(…)
episode 31: Evil Ted
What doesn’t seem very exciting are the current earnings. The $20 opp was the only reasonable one I saw. All the other opportunities range from $5 to $6 which is not exciting at all. For this kind of money you can’t really expect that the bloggers will do reasonable research and put a lot of work into their postings. For customers these rates might be very good, since you can get over 100 postings for $1000, but for such a system to work it has to be fair for both the customers and the bloggers – or quality of the end result might suffer.
As I wrote on my recent twitter-message I spent the evening on Facebook tonight. The social pressure was growing over the last couple of weeks and today my tipping point has been reached: After being registered since September 2006, today is the day I really start to use Facebook.
Checking out facebook I found some nice statistics:
# Facebook has 31 mio active users (an active user means being active in the last 30 days)
# Facebook is growing with over 100’000 users per day and 3% per week (meaning doubling every six months)
# 50% of all active users visit the site every day
# More than 40 billion page views per month (meaning facebook surpassed eBay and is now No. 13 at Alexa)
# Facebook has raised more than $38 mio in venture capital in three rounds
# Facebook has more than 300 employees (and more than 85 developers)
# Facebook has been launched in February 2004, reached 1 mio users in December 2004 and 10 mio users in autumn 2006.
# Over 1800 applications have been built on Facebook Platform (about 800 have more than 1000 users)
# The top 10 applications have all more than 3 mio users!
I also watched Mark’s f8 keynote launching Facebook Platform and learned the following:
# Facebook Platform will kick ass!
# It’s like an operating system and could create a new industry (social application industry)
# I’ve already installed two of my favorite applications: Twitter and Plazes. The twitter application has almost 30’000 users, the Plazes application has already 600 users.
# If they continue to grow this fast, Facebook could soon be one of my most used websites
# If you run a web-service (or a social network), you should build a Facebook application soon (or someone else will fill your niche)
# There could be a huge business opportunity for application developers
My application wishlist:
# XING
# LinkedIn
# StudiVZ
# Exsila
# memberYou
Open questions & open thoughts:
# Will StudiVZ be able to follow Facebook? In my opinion StudiVZ is in a very good position because Facebook is not very strong in central Europe. But will they be able to go from "Students" to "Everybody" in such a smooth way like Facebook? Or will StudiVZ sooner or later be aquired by Facebook?
# Microsoft is partnering with Facebook. My first thought was: Maybe Microsoft is preparing to buy or merge with Facebook one day? This could be the ticket for Microsoft to seriously come closer to Google.
Conclusion:
WOW!
More Links:
Flavio about Facebook
Wikipedia about Facebook
Russian Facebook (looks familiar? ;-) –> one of the fastest growing russian websites (comparison with StudiVZ)
Dutch Facebook
Australian Facebook
Chinese Facebook
Turkish Facebook
As I just wrote at Gründerszene, Supertext AG recently raised their first round of financing:
Gestern Abend an einer Geburtstagsparty hat mir Rinaldo Dieziger das OK für die Veröffentlichung gegeben (um ehrlich zu sein weiss ich dies schon eine ganze Weile
, dass die Supertext AG ihre erste Finanzierungsrunde abgeschlossen hat. Der letzte Handelsregister-Eintrag verrät, dass es sich auch hier (wie bei Exsila schon) um Beat Schillig von der IFJ Institut für Jungunternehmen AG handelt und die Supertexter offenbar 40% ihres Unternehmens abgegeben haben. Supertext ist eine Textagentur, welche Tuning oder Kreation von Texten anbietet. Das Unternehmen arbeitet mit über 100 professionellen Textern zusammen. Die Jungs bloggen im Superblog.
Some Superpics to remember:
When:
Where:
AYA, Drinx & Talx
Hardstrasse 260 (Steinfelsplatz)
8005 Zürich
www.aya-bar.ch
Who:
Entrepreneurs & Investors (everybody is invited)
More information:
XING Event page
When:
Where:
AYA, Drinx & Talx
Hardstrasse 260 (Steinfelsplatz)
8005 Zürich
www.aya-bar.ch
Who:
Entrepreneurs & Investors (everybody is invited)
More information:
XING Event page
Today the trigami Dog and myself took a trip to Bern to visit eBay International Headquarters. We met with Yves Mäder (Head of Marketing) and Frank Mickeler (Internet Marketing Manager). As promised we took a group photo:
Approximately 100 people work in Bern for eBay and all the International markets outside the US are coordinated from there.
The meeting with Yves and Frank was very interesting. Thanks for the invitation!
PS: Yves is also a trigami-Blogger and already wrote two reviews:
FamilyOne – Start eines FamilienAlbums und Familienbaums
soundmedia.ch vs eBay.ch – ein Vergleich
One of my goals with this new domain name [remo.fm] is to become No. 1 on Google.com for the search term "remo" within 12 months. I’m convinced this is possible :-).
Three months later, I’m already ranked 7th and domains like remo.nl are behind me. But remo.com is still going to be tough :-).
Wish me luck and don’t forget to link to remo.fm (e.g. change the chuchichaeschtli.com links in your blogroll to remo.fm – thx ;-).
In Europa wird es vermutlich eine Weile dauern, bis man sich an XING gewöhnt hat. Auch wenn es in Europa (und insbesondere Deutschland) bestimmt die einen oder anderen Aufschreie geben wird, wage ich folgende Hypothese: In 12 Monaten wird “XING” nicht nur so normal sein wir “openBC”, sondern auch so normal wie Google, Yahoo oder eBay. Gerne bin ich bereit, in einem Jahr dieses Thema nochmals aufzugreifen.
Now it’s official: Bye bye OPEN Business Club AG, welcome XING AG
And to even more recapitulate:
Warum XING in meinen Augen besser ist als openBC:
1. Es ist ein Phantasiename, der sich beliebig neu assoziieren lässt
2. Er ist kürzer (glaubt mir, Ihr werdet die 4 Buchstaben lieben)
3. Er eröffnet neue Wachstumschancen in den USA und in Asien (wo “openBC” ja bekanntlich nicht so gut geeignet war)
In my brain, point one was done a couple of months ago. The new association (XING = business social network & address-book 2.0) is wired in my brain and the term "openBC" is deleted. Point two is awsome, I really love the shortness of the 4 letters. Point three seems to be on the way.
As I mentioned already, I love these Blendtec Videos. Recently an iPhone got blended:
[flash]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNzyVIhnnDU[/flash]
PS: The blended iPhone can be purchased at eBay
(via Basic Thinking & Superblog)
