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Crouching tiger, hidden dragon. Can China or India (or even the UK) produce a global Internet company?

April 16, 2009 disruptive business
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Crouching tiger, hidden dragon. Can China or India (or even the UK) produce a global Internet company? Where are all the Web or mobile entrepreneurs in these countries who want to win a global market?

SteveHarmon.com

I remember organizing and hosting startup events all over the world about 10 years ago. The one thing that always struck me as strange: very little innovation outside the U.S. A country like England, for example, has always had lots of creative people. It gave us the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Leona Lewis, Coldplay and more.

Yet when I produced the event in London there were few innovators. Ditto for other cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney. These events attracted over 100,000 people…to watch, learn and discover. But not to share.

I find it very odd that a valley in California generates most of the world’s technology innovation. I live in Silicon Valley so I know why. But I find it odd that countries such as China with tremendous engineering and talent (and India) haven’t produced a global Internet brand, one used in dozens of countries, the same way Google, Yahoo or Facebook is.

SteveHarmon.com

Yes, there’s Baidu and Taobao. But outside of China nobody knows of them. Skype is one of the only European-started Internet companies to have made it into a global powerhouse. When the founders sold it to eBay a few years ago Skype had about 50 million registered users. Today it has over 400 million. And rumor has it that the founders want to buy Skype back from eBay for about $2 billion. November of 2007 I shared a thought with the venture investor in Skype, Tim Draper (he invested in Hotmail, Skype and others), and suggested he buy it back, that it was worth more than any investor gave it credit for. Face it, Skype is better than most phones anywhere. And free.

Tim’s reply to me:
“Finally, someone who gets it. I think I should buy it back.”

Getting back to my original idea: can a global Internet company come out of China, India or the UK?

My belief is yes. Venture capital is starting to invest in these countries.  But is it just capital? money never made success. Ask Boo.com. Venture capital is only as good as the companies it backs. Sometimes companies get sloppy with capital and other times, venture backers have no vision or patience.

So setting there won’t be as easy as 1-2-3. There is no paint by numbers formula. However, there is a method. It takes sweat, persistence. Tenacity. Here are some basic foundations–

10 Steps For China, India or the UK to create a global Internet powerhouse:

1) see a global opportunity, not just country opportunity. Most American startups see the world as a market, the US being just one market

2) map out how to achieve global presence

3) get investors who understand global trade and the opportunity

4) study US, Europe and Asian markets to see how your solution meets needs worldwide

5) name the company something that means nothing in every language. In other words, don’t sound American, Chinese or Indian. Sound universal.

6) hire people with global experience to strengthen the team

7) raise enough capital to be able to compete globally

8) be fun

9) partner with companies that can help you realize the vision

10) encourage creative thoughts, not boring business as usual

My belief is that there’s no reason why a Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Intel cannot come out of China, India or the UK.

The more amazing part is one hasn’t yet in 15 years of the Web industry. As an entrepreneur, investor and executive who has helped build companies that today are part of Google, Motorola and more, I know the talent is there in China, India and the UK. My network of over 1,700 entrepreneurs (spark network) is proof. So let’s go.

Now is the time for “leaping tiger, flying dragon.”

Taleee.com

Taleee.com

The Glass Is 90% Full…

March 13, 2009 disruptive business
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Good News Worth Sharing, Read On:

Daily the media reminds all of us of ‘chicken little’ and creates a kind of negative do-loop that doesn’t recognize the hard-working people in the US, UK, China, Japan, Asia, Europe, etc. that are paying their bills, managing their money, paying their taxes, and are being asked to bail out the “experts” who marketed mortgages to people who never should have “qualified” for them in the first place.

It may not be easy but these are the ones the media isn’t congratulating. So this is a congratulations I’d like to share with you, some real good news, that, if shared side by side with the negative stuff the media spews out, would dwarf the bad stuff.

The problem with the media is it doesn’t know how to report good things. It doesn’t know how to balance a story. It exists to shock and awe you in order to sell advertising. Plain and simple.

Actually, it’s time for some good news. Enjoy this breath of fresh air:

7 out of 8 homes in America are being paid for by hard-working people who qualified for the mortgage they have and continue to pay.

90% of adult Americans are employed.

Car dealers in China sold 25% more cars in February vs. January, or 1.56 million cars.

Car dealers in the U.S. sold 1.35 million cars in February (which has only 28 days in it).
That’s 48,214 cars sold every day of February
or…
2,009 per hour for 24 hours all month long
or…
33 cars every minute of the day
or…
just over 1 car sold every two minutes for 24 hours for the entire month

Hold on…there’s more.

Honda’s sales in China are up 16% vs. a year ago as its government introduced a tax cut on new vehicle purchases.
GM, Toyota, VW and others forecast good demand in Asia.

G’ day…

94.8% of adult Australians are employed.

What? no soup lines there…

91% of adult Europeans (across the entire European Union) are employed.

But the real story is not negative, it’s positive. It’s about honest people who make the world go round. That’s you and I. Copy this into your email, friend networks, and blogs, share this with at least 10 of your fellow hard-working friends. The real news is hard to come by.

And keep up the good work.

—

sponsor: Taleee, the sum of consumer opinion.

www.taleee.com

Me Networks

March 11, 2009 disruptive business
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I’ve seen social networks grow from the zygote stage to the infant stage.

The biggest question I’ve always had with social networks is the “why factor?” As in, why use it?

When Friendster became the first network to really become popular I also took a look at MySpace, which was then owned by a small public company and trading for a fraction of its value today.

Those were the days (2003) when Friendster had all the presidential candidates with their own profiles and pages, and the site was very popular in the media.

At that time I noticed there wasn’t a social network for colleges (this was 2004). Facebook hadn’t got going yet. In those days most college students used Friendster, it was the network du jour. I expected someone to come out with a college-focused network and that eventually happened.

Yet all the early efforts at a social network were really more like “Geocities 2.0,” personal pages that were stagnant with information. Publish and forget. There was little reason to read a friend’s profile over and over.

MySpace has since been acquired and looks to have refocused somewhat on its music and hip roots. If you recall the early MySpace it was all about music, bands, gigs, parties.

Facebook has since opened its doors to allcomers and seen tremendous growth, over 100 million users worldwide.

And I’m now beginning to see signs that some social networks are becoming more than personal vanity pages. You see status updates, link sharing, photo sharing, etc.

In China, tencent’s QQ network is the world’s largest and most vibrant community so far with 355 million active accounts (source: tencent). Web and mobile blend in a continual flow of conversation among users. In many ways it is ahead of Facebook in functionality.

Despite the large user bases the challenge has been for social networks to become revenue generating businesses. At least that’s been the conventional observation.

Advertising so far has been anathema to social networks, similar to a billboard being paraded through your living room while you and a friend talk on the couch. If you look at the ads on Facebook and MySpace they are irrelevant, untargeted and resemble the kind of spam you get in your email box daily.

Which is surprising given that social networks have so much demographic data on each user. Name, age, location, likes/dislikes, etc. are all there on a user profile and in the social network’s database. This is the kind of uber-data that advertiser’s love.

If we step back a minute and look at social networks objectively, to me they’re just the Web, foreshadowing the promise of what the Web is becoming. And it’s bigger than the term “social network.”

I think this is an interim moniker for the connections people are making and that people, including the original Internet surfer Vint Cerf (who was part of the Internet formation in 1969) and Tim Berners-Lee (CERN hyper geek), had in mind in a connected world.

If we fast forward I think we’re on the way to “me networks” where information streams every which way but in a relevant and targeted way — not the random rumblings seen today on social networks.

In the future I think we lose what we call TV networks, radio networks, newspapers, and information from all sources, professional and personal, friends and others, blur into our “me network” where the information is organized and presented based on priority, context, relevance, and value to each of us in real time.

About Steve Harmon: Steve is a veteran of the Web industry as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. His report began in 1994 and is read worldwide by the leaders in tech, finance and media from Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and people all over the US, Europe and Asia. Reach me at steve@steveharmon.com

The #1 Thing Obama’s Plan Is Missing

February 22, 2009 disruptive business
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Ideas Are The Economy

The most important asset any nation has are the people with creative
ideas. No ideas = no growth. Plain and simple. It’s the one thing that
is missing from EVERY economic stimulus plan I’ve seen.

For example, imagine that Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to open a
store selling electronics parts instead of having an idea that software
should be sold and the PC would become popular?

Imagine that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had continued to hack around
phone boxes or simply went to work for HP instead of inventing the Apple
computer?

Imagine that George Lucas decided to become a comic book writer instead
of creating Star Wars (yes, it was just an idea at one time).

Imagine that Nintendo caved in on the video game console wars and
dismissed the idea of the Wii: PS2 won anyway, right?

Imagine if Google had said “well, Alta Vista is king and Yahoo already
owns the user? so let’s accept the job offer from Oracle.”

Imagine if Larry Ellison had conceded databases to IBM, after all Big
Blue already had several decades headstart and billions of cash.

Imagine if eBay’s Pierre Omidyar had said “Onsale is better funded and
backed by Kleiner Perkins, maybe I’ll just stay at General Magic.”

Imagine if Walt Disney had said to his brother Roy: “we’ve failed
numerous times, nobody wants a talking mouse.”

Ideas can build and destroy value.

The #1 way for any government to boost their economy is invest in people
with ideas: entrepreneurs.

Imagine if each city created its own mini business incubator where

entrepreneurs could incubate their ideas, create new companies, create new value, create new jobs, create new liquidity.

Imagine if the U.S. government invested $500 billion into a national
program to spawn entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into value.

What you would see would be value creation on the magnitude that venture
capital or Wall Street could never enable.

You would see an economy growing double digit.

You would be part of this.

It’s possible.

In the UK, the government announced a $1 billion venture fund. More
governments need to start thinking ahead and become more efficient in
stimulating their economies.

The #1 way is through investing in people with ideas.

The #1 thing Obama’s economic plan is missing is an investment in you.

Quotes Worth Sharing

December 23, 2008 disruptive business
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Happy holidays, here are some quotes you may enjoy. Share with a friend…

Albert Einstein:
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Buckminster Fuller:
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Carl Sagan:
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Victor Hugo:
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Steve Jobs:
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.

Pablo Picasso:
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

Walt Disney:
If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.

Bill Gates:
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.

—————

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