Business Models

Speaking of the decline of Consumer Web VC money, there is an interesting article on Gabe Rivera and Techmeme (who have never taken VC money) on Bloomberg. To recap, Rivera created Techmeme in 2005, tracking the output of blogs and news outlets tracking the technology scene. Techmeme used algorithms to decide the day’s most important headlines and grouprd together similar posts from different sites. Rivera started with $55,000 in personal savings. In 2006, he began selling ads and buying staff. Techmeme now has a staff of 12 who mostly work from his San Francisco apartment or their own homes (low cost or what....). While the algorithms for sifting news have improved, Techmeme has had to use human input as well (that really interested us, as it proved a hypotheis we had - for now, anyway).

Techmeme has always interested me for 3 reasons - the technology, the possible impact on the media market structure, and its business model - the opposite of the "get rich quick" startup model, its a long term game to create a valuable service sustainably. It has never gone for VC, looking instead to grow organically, from it's roots as it were. Many VC's have wanted to invest in it over the years, Rivera turned them down:

“The first time I asked Gabe if he would be interested in an angel investment,” said [Jeff] Clavier, “he replied something like: ‘I don’t want to deal with the obligations attached to raising money, and I still want to be able to take a nap after lunch.’”

Mark Suster, who I also have a lot of time for, believes it is not "VC" able

“Gabe is not the guy a VC would invest in,” Suster said. “I’m trying to find the guy who can say, ‘I want to change the world and have the biggest company possible.’ That’s who I need to finance. History would not suggest that he’s that guy.”

Techmeme has already has an influence far greater than its revenues, it genuinely did "change the world" in being the first believably viable real time media search engine - it just didn't follow that it should also "get big, fast" too. I'm sure it would have been possible to take loadsamoney, charge down a bunch of verticals with the Techmeme engine, and find all sorts of creative ways to spend VC money to pump up the volume of hits, and probably even IPO it in the Bubbletime - we've seen all that before. Rivera has also launched a separate site that aggregates media news, Mediagazer, and expects to do the same for other news-driven verticals, but at an organic pace - Once set up, the running cost of this technology is low cost, but the running cost of feeding a beast that is too big for its market is exorbitant. I think this quote from Rivera is telling:

“I don’t believe anyone aiming to build the ‘biggest company possible’ could have made something like Techmeme,” said Rivera. “Any such person working on something remotely similar to Techmeme would instead focus on how to reach tens of millions of users as quickly as possible, and as a result, the relevance of the product for a community as focused as Techmeme’s would suffer.”

I have a hunch Techmeme will be around long after some of today's other Web 2.0/Social Media darlings have colllapsed, as its based on real user demand and an economically sustainable cost base.

There is also a difference in motivation between a "build-to-run" entrepreneur and a "build-to-sell" one, I liken it to the difference between an artist who creates what is true to them, vs one who creates what will sell, now. Big studios love commercial art, but there is another whole market for "indie" art, which is often highly influential over time, and it doesn't always require starving in a garret.

Anyway, the lesson for Consumer Web startups in this most declining of VC funding times is to start looking at organic, sustainable growth business models - Techmeme shows it can be done, it doesn't necessarily mean starving in a garret, plus you could build some great stuff and create a lot of personal karma. And take afternoon naps.....

Wikipedia - Gartner Hype Curve


On Friday the Grauniad/Observer asked us what we thought of the current Groupon brouhaha, what can we say except our story hasn't changed since 2010, when I summarised this post, where I was jousting at the Groupon boosters, with this view of Groupon:

...its a nice, viable business - but not the New New Thing that it is being hyped up to be....once the hype is over - smaller market [cap], lower margins, back to Coupons 2.0

When it IPO'd in 2011 we noted that a lot of people were going to lose their shirts:

We can only apologise to the readers of our Bubblewatch series, in that we never predicted an attempt to IPO a Greater Fool Theory dotcom business before the big one [Facebook] had gone out. Move the notch up one (see chart in linked post). DotCom II is nearly here now*....a whole bunch of dumb pension funds will invest - with your money. [But} This Time It Is Different, as everyone seemed to arguing at D9.

For what its worth, I am unimpressed with all the calls to remove the CEO's head, its the kneejerk response of the panicking class. It works if he is under-executing, or a Bright New Thing can take the company in a bright new new direction, but that is not the problem here. The problem here is as old as snake oil: greedy-but-dumb investors thought that social media fairy dust would transform a coupon company (typically trading at 1 x revenues + cash) to a super-dotcom trading at dotcom values. It won't, and the social media bubble has now deflatuled, so everyone is overcorrecting like mad as they slide into the Slough of Despond (see Hype curve above). I think human "animal spirits" have a lot to answer for!

And the CEO, Andrew Mason, has done a darn sight better than many, he managed to IPO in the bubbletime, at the top of the Peak Of Inflated Expectations and keep $1.2bn cash in hand while getting the company to be both market No 1 and to break-even status. He has thus given Groupon a hell of a lot of runway to "pivot" on, or improve their efficiency, or downscale, or whatever - the point is they have the cash so they have the room for manouevre. Many others don't.

But fundamentally, the issue is that they are a coupon business - it's a real business, so it has real business costs, as we said to the Observer, and that means it could never sustain those dotcom valuations in the short term. Reminds me a lot of directory businesses like Yell.

*it's gone now, Facebook saw to that.

Recent bit of research implies Spotify may be ending its growth run....PaidContent

Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan, presenting at Future Music Forum in Barcelona on Thursday, sounded a note of caution…

“There is a natural ceiling of adoption of the people who are willing to pay $9.99 a month for music they don’t own. If you look at growth from launch, Spotify is – at best – on par with where we should be. The likes of imeem were the future of the music industry once, too. The most Vodafone (UK) got to was about 600,000 customers – Spotify’s (UK) paying subscriber count is about 600,000 to 800,000. This market should be much more dynamic than where we are now. It’s a niche proposition. The majority of mass-market consumers are still not interested in that pricepoint.”

So, is there a natural limit of about 800,000 people who pay for this sort of music? If not, where is it?

At £9.99 a month that's about £120 pa that Spotify charges. When we looked at the UK music industry a few years back (to help a client work out the viability of music on smart mobiles, oddly enough - and I'm too lazy to look up the latest data as I doubt things have changed a lot in numbers or propensity), it bifurcated into 2 markets - "singles" and "albums". These few years back, "singles" buyers were about 5m people in the UK and spent c £12 pa, so this demographic are not Spotify paying customers. There were about 15m "album" buyers who spend c £80pa on average, so the higher spending of them are the potential customers. But £120 pa is c 50% higher than their mean spend of £80, so how many of the 15m will pay it?

Allow me a quick blog-packet calculation. Assuming a standard normal distribution curve (a bell curve), only about 2% of all users lie outside the 2 standard deviation level, and about 16% outside the single standard deviation limit. Making the assumption that a 50% increase in the mean price is outside the 2 standard deviation limit one can estimate that the total UK market for Spotify customers is about 2% of 15m, or c 300,000 people. If its above one standard deviation there are c 16%, or 2.4m people, who are potential customers. This is not to say that all will be customers, of course - converting 50% of all these higher end album buyers to Spotify yields a market ceiling of 1.2m people (remember that Apple and various others are also in the hunt for this spend, never mind the people who just won't want to pay hard cash for music they dont own), at 1 standard deviation. (I find it hard to believe that a 50% higher price point above the mean is much less than 1 standard deviation). If you believe that they can only convert less that 50%, or that the price of £120pa is greater than 1 standard deviation from the £80 mean, then that number starts to fall quite fast (for example, 1.5 standard deviations is a mere 7% or c 1m potential customers in total).

If you assume instead its a power law operating (say the 80/20 spread), then you believe that the top 20% will spend 80% of the money, so about 3m people will spend about £360 a head -so for them, paying for Spotify is a bagatelle. But how many of them wiill spend it? Again, assuming a 50% penetration only yields about 1.5m users. Now to be sure, there will be a few from the next 20%, but not many - power laws recede very fast, the next 20% spend only 12% of the money, so its about a £50 mean spend for this quintile - clearly most of them are not Spotify paid users. Now you can play with various distributions, but the fact remains there are not a lot of people who are going to spend £120 pa on music, no matter which you use, and much fewer of those who will buy it from Spotify (or any of the streamers for that matter, I merely use Spotify as it was the one commented on).

In summary, Mark is probably right, at this price point there is not huge room for further growth.

The other thing that came out of this piece was even more "interesting":

Spotify is having to acquire 1.9 million new customers a month in order to retain 400,000. It’s a huge, huge marketing problem. The average pay TV service would want to see churn rates in the low single-digit percent.

Never mind the cost of new customer capture.....

But to my mind the fundamental threat they face is from good old offset funding, from good old offset funders like Google (who is a fairly regular player in this offset funding game) with YouTube - as Mark says:

And all of their cases are challenged further by an uneven playing field. While all those music services have to charge for mobile access and have some gaps in their catalogues, YouTube provides unlimited access, on all mobile devices, with the world’s largest music catalogue, with video, for absolutely no cost at all to the consumer. As far as streaming goes, there is one rule for YouTube, and another for the rest. Until that anomaly is fixed, the rest will be swimming against the tide.

The only thing that has stopped YouTube from being the category killer yet is that no one has written a music playlist playout UI as good as Spotify's yet.

I was an early "Free" customer. Would I pay £9.99 a month? - No, but mainly because I know that its $9.99 (about £6.70) in the USA a and Euro 9.99 (about £8) in Europe. Comparison shopping ftw....my price point starts at the same deal everyone else is getting.

Just saw this on the Wall Street Job Report following up an original Bloomberg article:

Analysts who broke away from the herd and told investors to avoid Facebook Inc. (FB), the biggest initial public offering ever by a technology company, are looking like heroes after the stock plunged.

But here is the bit I really liked - we are some of those Heroes!

Alan Patrick of Broadsight described the Facebook hype as being like a bubble, The Guardian says. Although he wrongly predicted that the Facebook stock price would rise on the IPO’s first day of trading, claiming that “There are always ‘greater fools’ prepared to buy at a higher price,” Patrick did say that he thought Facebook would have a tough time at that valuation of meeting performance targets.

As to us thinking the price would rise, the Guardian interviewed us 2 days before the IPO, one day later we had come to the conclusion they probably would not even rise (they had upped the number of shares on sale for e.g.), as we told Brasil Economico that evening:

....people should note there is always a lot of carefully manufactured hype around a big IPO like this, to create "irational exuberance" buying patterns, quite often the stock price goes down for a while afterwards. The biggest risk is declining growth and/or revenue per user - their last quarters report showed slowing growth - and the long term risk is that they have priced the company very high, so a lot of things have to "go right" for it to grow into this valuation.

Blowing our own trumpet - hell yes!. Not only does it prove our superior analytical methods*, but, As Gore Vidal (RIP) said, "The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."

(For what its worth we are not Analysts per se, which makes it even more amusing.)

By the way, with Facebook now at c $20 a share, just a few more pennies down and it may be worth thinking of buying some shares, probably wait till the next Quarter figures though. (Obligatory Caution - we are not Investment Advisors etc etc either...)

*I think taking an independent, analytical look at the facts goes a long way....

Recently I've had cause to look at Evolution/Intelligent Design, various contentious historical issues, and one or two about more controversial current political movements (think children's exams....) and have of course gone to the Internet as a first source. The result has left me a bit disturbed, in that the Page 1 of Google is increasingly not full of truth, but full of very biassed (and wrong) information put out by very enthusiastyec special interest groups. I can't measure it, but I am fairly certain it has got a lot worse over the last few years since the Web became mainstream. I think the reason is twofold

(i) Idealogues/Zealots/Enthusiasts/Extremists/Evangelists of all stripes are just far more active than the silent majority, and put their stuff out there, link to it, read it often etc. Google's search algorithms and Social Graphs see "popular" as "better", so up go the ratings of this content.

(ii) Good information is increasingly being hidden behind paywalls. When we started Broadsight in 2005 there was a lot of good information that was easily available on-net (so reaserch via Google was easy), but over time we have noticed the owners have erected paywalls around it. I count research papers, reports, tabular data and articles by respected journals and publications among these.

The result is seemingly that "Bad Information is driving out Good" - which of course reminded me of Gresham's Law

Gresham's law states: "When a government compulsorily overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation."[1] It is commonly stated as: "Bad money drives out good", but is more accurately stated: "Bad money drives out good if their exchange rate is set by law."

This doesn't mean one has to value poor money more highly, it is as bad if they are valued equally. When there are two forms of commodity money in circulation which are required by legal-tender laws to be accepted as having similar face values for economic transactions, the then artificially overvalued bad money tends to drive the artificially undervalued good money out of circulation.

When I replaced "money" by information, and "Government" etc as "Search System" I got this:

Gresham's law of information states: "When a search algorithm compulsorily overvalues one type of information (poor/false information) and undervalues another (good/true information), the undervalued information will leave the open Web or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued information will flood into circulation." It is commonly stated as: "Bad information drives out good", but is more accurately stated: "Bad information drives out good if their exchange rate is set by (search algorithmic) law."

As above, you don't have to value the poor information more highly, this law applies equally when there are two forms of information (good and bad) in circulation which are required by search algorithms to be accepted as having similar face values for search transactions. The Nobel prize-winner Robert Mundell believes that Gresham's Law could be more accurately rendered if it were expressed as "Bad information drives out good if they exchange for the same price." The "same price" is that a search engine treast all links as of the same value. The now artificially overvalued poor information tends to drive an artificially undervalued good information out of circulation (ie off Google Page One).

Replacing "money" with "information" for Greshams law thus seems to be quite a useful thought experiment. It is therefore worth taking Gresham's analysis further, and looking at some research summaries of its impact from Wikipedia and see if here are parallels:

Rolnick and Weber (1986) argued that bad money would drive good money to a premium rather than driving it out of circulation. However, their research did not take into account the context in which Gresham made his observation. Rolnick and Weber ignored the influence of legal tender legislation which requires people to accept both good and bad money as if they were of equal value. They also focused mainly on the interaction between different metallic monies, comparing the relative "goodness" of silver to that of gold, which is not what Gresham was speaking of.

So you have to have the rule of accepting good and bad as equal value for Greshams Law to apply, though I do think there is some truth in the statement "bad money would drive good money to a premium", as that is what I also see happening now - bad information is driving good information to a premium, ie if you want truth you have to pay, if you want "free" information its likely to be poorer information. That is echoed in this example:

^Adam Fergusson pointed out that in 1923 during the great Inflation in the Weimar Republic Gresham's Law began to work in reverse, since the official money became so worthless that virtually nobody would take it. This was particularly serious since farmers began to hoard food. Accordingly, any currencies backed by any sorts of value became the circulating mediums of exchange.In 2009 Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe began to show similar characteristics^

I think this is parallelled now with people "hoarding" good information behind paywalls, and I think those "in the know" increasingly only go to sites they trust. But that is not what the mass search and social graph algorithms are aiding and abetting, they are still "accepting good and bad as equal value" by going on quantity oh links etc, and assuming that quantity = quality. This same effect is seen in some corollaries elsewhere:

The experiences of dollarization in countries with weak economies and currencies (for example Israel in the 1980s, Eastern Europe and countries in the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or South American countries throughout the late 20th and early 21st century) may be seen as Gresham's Law operating in its reverse form (Guidotti & Rodriguez, 1992), since in general the dollar has not been legal tender in such situations, and in some cases its use has been illegal

For money, the argument is that, in the absence of legal tender laws, Gresham's Law works in reverse. If given the choice of what money to accept, people will transact with money they believe to be of highest long-term value. If required to accept all money, good and bad, they will tend to keep the money of greater perceived value in their possession, and pass on the bad money to someone else. In short, in the absence of legal tender laws, the seller will not accept anything but money of certain value (good money), while the existence of legal tender laws will cause the buyer to offer only money with the lowest commodity value (bad money) as the creditor must accept such money at face value. This reverse of Gresham's Law, that good money drives out bad money whenever the bad money becomes nearly worthless, has been named "Thiers' Law" by economist Peter Bernholz, in honor of French politician and historian Adolphe Thiers."Thiers' Law" will only operate later [in the cycle] when the increase of the new flexible exchange rate and of the rate of inflation lower the real demand for the inflating money.

Turning this round to information economics, I see the following at present:

(i) I'm trying to think of a case where the bad information is so bad that no one trusts it, and will only trade in good infirmation. I think we are getting there with advertising overall, as people are trusting it less and less so it has to become more and more obtrusive/underhand/agressive. However, although for money the examples show that in the absence of legal tender laws, Gresham's Law works in reverse, I can't see it easily in Information at present. I don't see people preferring Paid Search (though that may come), but I do see people preferring reccomendation based systems where the recommenders can be verified as bona fide.

(ii) Looking at Thiels law, in the Information cycle I can see the "flexible exchange rate" as some form of tunable search (away from recommendation by mass popularity - maybe recommendation/social graph based search). Information "inflation" may work differently in that the increasing amount of crapformation reduces the amount of Ad money per (inflating numbers of pages) it can attract and it collapses under its own Freeconomic weight, but I just can't see that its a given that eventually good infirmation will come back in and be used in preference to bad information overall.

(iii) I don't think this really applies in information flow, the closest parallel I can think of is entities keep good information (about customer real behaviour) but pass out false information in their own data. i see this a lot in campaigning statistics, where special interest lobbyists continually stretch teh definition of what is included in their cause to argue a larger % of the population is impacted by X, or is a Y, or whatever, wheres their researchers are probably well aware of what the actual reserach says.

The Nobel prize-winner Robert Mundell believes that Gresham's Law could be more accurately rendered, taking care of the reverse, if it were expressed as, That would be re-stated as "Bad information drives out good if they exchange for the same price."

The question is, will the same be true with information, given that it is hard to see easily what is true and what is not (and the huge amount of effort being put into ensuring that it is hard to tell the false apart - information counterfeiting is rife). The way this will work out is probably that some "information issuers" will become more trusted. However, the more fundamental (ist) issue I see is that will only ever be true for those who seek truth, as the reason so much of the poor information is on the Web is that it panders to those who want to believe it in the first place.

Which makes me think there are 2 main types of "bad" information:

(i) Belief based - wrong information to support a particular belief set

(ii) "Lemon" based - crap information, there to try and hide the selling of lemons

Dealing with lemons first, there is a convenient economic "Law of lemons", from George Akerlof

Akerlof uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. A used car market is one in which there are good used cars ("cherries") and defective used cars ("lemons"), normally as a consequence of several not-always-traceable variables such as the owner's driving style, quality and frequency of maintenance and accident history. Because many important mechanical parts and other elements are hidden from view and not easily accessible for inspection, the buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a cherry or a lemon. So the buyer's best guess for a given car is that the car is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a car of known average quality. This means that the owner of a carefully maintained, never-abused, good used car will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that car worthwhile.

The result is a Greshams Law effect, in that owners of good cars will not place their cars on the used car market. The withdrawal of good cars reduces the average quality of cars on the market, causing buyers to revise downward their expectations for any given car. This, in turn, motivates the owners of moderately good cars not to sell, and so on. The result is that a market in which there is asymmetric information with respect to quality shows characteristics similar to those described by Gresham's Law.

For information markets the not-always-traceable variables are that the reqder cannot easily test the information to know its veracity. What i am not sure I am seeing is a market where all buyers (readers of information) treat the information with increased scepticism, though as noted above the Ad industry experience (and popularity of recommendation based choice) seems to indicate this is true.

An economic lemon market will be produced by the following:

- Asymmetry of information, in which no buyers can accurately assess the value of a product through examination before sale is made and all sellers can more accurately assess the value of a product prior to sale
- An incentive exists for the seller to pass off a low quality product as a higher quality one
- Sellers have no credible disclosure technology (sellers with a great car have no way to disclose this credibly to buyers)
- Either a continuum of seller qualities exists or the average seller type is sufficiently low (buyers are sufficiently pessimistic about the seller's quality)
- Deficiency of effective public quality assurances (by reputation or regulation and/or of effective guarantees/warranties)

The rules for information lemon markets seem to be similar, the key to finding cherries would seem to be the ability to give sellers of good information a way to prove it, and/or making up the deficiency of public quality assurances for the buyer. As noted above, the way this seems to be working now is the trusted source route, allied with strong (and validated) recommendations from peers.

Which leaves us with the thorny problem of dealing with the second type of "wrong" data - belief based misinformation (eg Creationism etc), where people want to believe it, want to be misled rather than being unwittingly misled, and that drives a huge market for information publishing that drives out good information. Also, its is often funded (or at least volunteer produced) rather than purely freeconomic so will probably not collapse under its own Weimar information inflation.

This to me is the more dangerous one, as its not clear what market forces will displace it - if anything, the market forces are destroying good mainstream journalism, only the paywall material seems to be surviving. I don't see how social media solves this, as the social graph will collaborate in its own pollution and dumbing down. At the moment I am coming to the rather worrying conclusion that in the future people will have to pay for truth, which of course limits its market - so do we wind up on a 2-part state of mind here?

From the FT:

Royal Mail has increased the price of first and second-class stamps by 14p to record highs, after it was given freedom to set its own prices as it heads towards privatisation.

A first-class stamp will now cost 60p, with the slower second class service priced at 50p from April 30, the UK’s state-owned postal service announced on Tuesday.

Apparently without the price rise the service is "at risk"

Moya Greene, Royal Mail chief executive, said that without the price rise the service was “at risk”.

Nothing to do with a coming privatisation play* I suppose .

(As in, if this saves the service, then it could have been done earlier and thus wouldn't need to be privatised. )

I wonder if it was put to the Public as to whether they would prepared to subsidise rather than privatise (given the biggest risk, the pension funding, stays as a public taxpayers risk anyway) they would get a different steer.

But I also think they are putting the service at risk with such a huge (25% for first class) stamp price increase as well, as the "Ratchet of Doom" system dynamic model diagram above shows. The Inconvenient Truth of this ratchet is at some point there are just not enough customers who wish to use the service. One almost wonders if ths is in fact designed to break the service as a universal one.

The irony is that they are doing this just as Internet shopping is really taking off, so the opportunities for Royal Mail are huge. Perish the thought that the public profit from it.....

* The CEO, Moya Greene,was on BBC TV tonight arguing that the best sort of public ownership is the public buying shares in the Royal Mail IPO. There is something about being asked to pay again for something you already own, while still being stuck with the huge pension liabilities, that makes you look at this "deal" offered and suspect that Joe Public is about to be shafted. But then private benefit/public risk bailouts are so de rigeur these days.....

Another interesting talk at Design of Understanding conference was by artist Luis Rey. He draws and paints dinosaurs. Now, any talk by a Spanish Londoner who draws and paints dinosaurs is interesting to start with, but he told a fascinating story which is even more fascinating.

Luis is a Dinosaur Geek - he wasn't content to just draw them, he had to get it abolutely right so started getting into paleontology and corresponding with all the leading dinosaur experts. This was in the 80's/90's when dinosaur reserach took two great leaps forward:

- firstly, more modern research and computer modelling revealed that dinosaurs did not walk upright, tails dragging on the ground, with waddly crocodile gaits. The long tails were part of the spine and were used as counterweights to the front, so the spine was held straight, horizontally, end to end. The carnivores even ran, very fast, more like ostriches.

- secondly, it was becoming clearer and clearer that many later dinosaurs had proto feathers, not traditional lizard skin, and in the mid 90's perfect feather fossils were fouind in Yixiang, China

So Luis had started drawing dinosaurs with straight spines and feathers (see picture above). And guess what - no-one wanted to publish them - because everyone knows that is not what dinosaurs look like. They told him he was barking - even though he was taking advice from the best authorities in the field at the time. The Jurassic Park movies coming out at the time took the decison to run many of the dinosaurs in the traditional poses as that is what dinosaurs "should" look like. It took the BBC's "Walking With Dinosaurs" to really change perception, and it was a somewhat courageous decision for them to do it (I suspect they could take the risk at the time as they do not rely on commercial funding - another reason to keep the BBC funding model there IMO)

It has taken most of the 90's and 'noughties for attitudes to change, and for feathered, fast running dinosaurs to become socially acceptable.

What amused and intrigued me is the dinosaur attitude problem (ie belief in things because of traditional received wisdom rather than keeping up with a changing fact base) even existed for dinosaurs.

But the lesson is that it took about 20 years from research findings to acceptance. It made me redouble my belief that we are seeing other many other "dinosaurs" all around us. I mean, if we can't even see dinosaurs clearly......

Forbes:

Social network Path has a bit of a problem – they’ve been caught uploading user’s address books to their servers without explicit permission. While it might make finding friends easier for the user, the fact it was ‘hidden’ has not gone down well. They’ve started to roll out an opt-in feature to their photo sharing software on the Android Client, with a similar option due to appear in the iOS.

From the American point of view, it’s a PR issue that requires explaining and a clear message from the team, and to be fair to CEO Dave Morin, he has apologised and explained the next steps.

But there might be a bit more of a headache in the UK. On my reading, Path is in breach of the Data Protection Act. The usual internet caveat of “I am not a lawyer” is in effect, but the plain English notes on the Information Commissioners website on the ‘fair’ use of data stress that the end users must know what is happening. Which is not the case with Path.

Indeed not.

And what goes for Path goes for Facebook, in multuplicate. Getting to that $15 - 20 ARPU to justify the IPO valuation is going to be far harder than assumed I think.

One to watch....

How to make startups attractive to women according to Penelope Trunkwriting in VentureBeat. The argument is that startups are not for women,and women don't need start ups:

The problem is that the funding world is set up to reward behaviors of 22-year-old guys. Living on very little salary, working very long hours, making your whole life your company, traveling at the drop of a hat — these are things people do when they do not have families. It’s a life that guys who are not even in a startup choose because it’s fun for guys. Women don’t choose that kind of life.

......

The thing is, women in their late 20s are the happiest they will be in their whole life. They are very happy. So I don’t think they are walking around wishing they could do a startup. I don’t think they care.

To make it more attractive they suggest 3 points.

1. Pay more money at the beginning. Women want a good house, good clothes and a cushion for emergencies. This is not sexist, this is basic research, and yes there are exceptions, but we have to talk in generalizations if we are going to talk about women as a group. Women shop more than men; women get more pleasure from buying stuff than men do. Whatever. Who cares? Women earn more than men do, so it’s a moot point. Except in the VC world, where the entrepreneur has to “bootstrap.” Women don’t like that. So VCs would have to give up on the bootstrapping mentality if they want women to do startups.

2. VCs would need to give up on speed. They would need to decide that their rate of return on investment can be slower, and they would need to learn how to invest in companies that could go a little slower. Such companies would want to take short breaks during summer vacation, for example, when the kids are home. VCs would have to be more patient, with a family-friendly policy toward growth and exits.

3. VCs would need to raise their own funds differently. You say, “Slow and easy? Then it’s not a startup!” And that might be true. But if we are really missing so many opportunities because women’s ideas are not getting through to market, then the market is probably so desperate for these ideas that VCs can afford to let them develop more slowly. And if someone would get to the market faster, well, then we are not really missing out on having women’s ideas in the status quo, are we?

Women must find their own way:

And in the meantime, let’s stop pretending that the stuff of startups is the stuff that most women want for their lives. Women should use a more current blueprint for their lives—one that takes into account what is important to women rather than what is important to men.

Questions in my mind:

- VC's have not so far felt the need to worry about female VC's, what will tip them over?

- Is the 22 year old male entrepreneur the only fundable model?

Answers on a postcard.

I was about to write down my thoughts about what happens now that Mr Arrington is no longer with TechCrunch*, until I saw Fred Wilson had written down pretty much what I would say - and even stolen the title I would have used . So, why write anything myself when I can plagiarise use Fred's words:

The media has had a lot of fun over the past week watching AOL, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Mike Arrington figure out how to move on. I feel badly for the TechCrunch crew including MG, Erick, Sarah, and many others. They are awesome at what they do and I feel that they've been left dangling as this soap opera has played out.

I do not feel badly for Mike. He's a bigtime player in silicon valley and he will be fine. Contrary to what many in the media say, he does not need TechCrunch as a platform to be influential. He is influential becuase of who he is, not where he writes. His reputation is made and as long as he finds his next platform, be it a venture fund, a blog, or both (how can anyone have both a blog and a venture fund????), he will remain a hugely influential force in silicon valley and tech.

But TechCrunch is a big question mark. If AOL can keep the rest of the team together, then TechCrunch has a bright future. No company is so reliant on one person that they can't survive that person's departure. But if others move on, including the people I mentioned above, then TechCrunch could lose its swag, as my son would put it. Yes TechCrunch gets scoops. That happens because it has a huge audience of the right readers and people in tech choose to leak to TechCrunch to reach that audience. But TechCrunch also has a voice, a swagger, a "fuck you" attitude that comes from Mike. That can also live on without Mike if AOL allows it. They need to keep the remaining team, the voice, and that attitude if they want to remain at the top of the world of tech media.

I also wonder what will happen to the European assets in the business, I think TC UK has been a good force over here.

Fred also alludes to the thing I have always really liked about TechCrunch, and in my opinion is a real jewel in its crown - Crunchbase:

There's also a super awesome asset inside TechCrunch that doesn't get much attention. It is Crunchbase.....Crunchbase, which is free, almost open, almost peer produced like Wikipedia, is fantastic. Whatever happens to TechCrunch AOL, please don't mess up Crunchbase. It is the premier data asset on the tech/startup world and an incredible example of how free beats paid in the online world we live in.

I also feel it is incredibly valuable, and if correctly used is (IMO) longer term worth more than TechCrunch the Blog - as many have pointed out, there are so many others doing what it does now.

*At the moment. The lady has yet to sing the death aria......