Insight Research Group. Interest network vs social network. From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory. Even now, it’s still shocking how the remarkably low distribution costs of the web can change a founder’s fate overnight. Many startups are duds, and most grow at a clip that’s just not fast enough to justify an interesting valuation. But once in awhile, a company comes along and just nails it. The right timing. The right market. The right place. I met Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger before they were working together. Systrom, meanwhile, had just come off of a year at Nextstop, a travel-oriented startup that had sold to Facebook in a talent acquisition.
In early 2010, Systrom was messing around with a few ideas. So Systrom, ever the connoisseur of fine whiskeys, tested an app called Burbn. Users weren’t exactly checking in all the time on Burbn. It was around this time that Krieger, who was ready for change after a year and a half at Meebo, came on board. They scrapped Burbn and started over. It took several months of prototyping and experimentation. Silicon Valley, London, NYC: Startup Genome Data Reveals How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up. Last year, we covered an ambitious collaborative R&D project called “Startup Genome,” created by three young entrepreneurs, Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, and Ertan Dogrultan. The goal of the ongoing project was (and is) to take a comprehensive, data-driven dive into what makes tech startups successful — and not so successful. Out of its research came, among other things, Startup Compass: A free benchmarking tool that leverages its data to allow entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress compared to other startups in their space.
The product’s overarching goal is to allow founders to make more informed product and business decisions by “utilizing a data-driven feedback loop,” according to its mission statement. While part of the team has since split off to focus on Blackbox, an educational program and startup accelerator, Herrmann and Marmer have continued toiling away at Startup Genome, collecting data from the some-16K startups that signed up for Startup Compass — and beyond. Why Mobile Ads in Emerging Markets are the Future [INFOGRAPHIC] There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers around the world, meaning 77% of the world's population uses a phone.
The majority of those users — 3.8 billion or 73% of the group — live in emerging economies. Yet mobile advertising dollars spent around the world do not begin to compete with traditional platforms or Internet ads. As the Internet spreads throughout the developing world, it's arriving on phones before traditional computers. Some 70% of Internet users in Egypt, 59% in India, 57% in South Africa, 50% in Ghana and 44% in Indonesia get online via mobile phones alone. This Jana infographic poses a question for advertisers — how will relevant content be delivered via mobile device? One idea: in Brazil, 74% of mobile users said they would like to receive advertisements in their devices in exchange for voice minutes. Do you have an answer to Jana's question? Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, hadynyah. Virtual Currency Is The Next Big Platform.
Editor’s note: Ari Mir is the co-founder and CEO of virtual currency platform Pocket Change. He also co-founded GumGum.com, the world’s largest in-image ad-network. This week, Mir is attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. My youth was spent jumping turtles, killing 16-bit Nazis, connecting kickflips with manuals and nube tubing. Haaaaadouken! Like most boys and young men during the ’80s and early ’90s, I loved video games. Our passion for games and our willingness to pay $49.99 to purchase the latest Zelda or Mortal Kombat fueled the industry’s growth. For two decades, selling hard and soft copies of games proved to be a very lucrative business.
Virtual goods are purchased with virtual currency, a digital medium of exchange similar to dollars and cents. The advertising industry has already seized the opportunity. Engaging with advertisers won’t be the only way to earn virtual currency. Virtual currency as a mass consumer product may sound far off. The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile. Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized.
We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) And raw computing power is taken for granted.
What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires).