To be honest I was a bit skeptical if Twitter is more than just telling my friends and followers that I am waiting for the next flight or other “interesting” and “thrilling” stuff .

Well, I gave it a try and started to post tweets two or three weeks ago. Sometimes I posted interesting links sometimes I shared my opinion.

Here comes the funny and somehow exciting story:

Some years ago I got an idea of a new business case. In order to not disclose the related companies I won’t explain which case it is.

I’ve tried to convince young potential founders in Germany to start such a business model. Well, nobody executed or even started.

About three weeks ago I’ve seen an announcement of a Silicon Valley start-up with more or less exactly the same case.

I wrote a tweet about this Silicon Valley based start-up. Just 10 hours later the CEO sent me an email. We never met and we aren’t connected on LinkedIN or Xing. My tweet found its way to him…

This event convinced me totally about the power and impacts of Social Media and especially Twitter.

just sit down, lean back, relax and enjoy – don’t get scared

This video shows perfectly how the web and social media have changed our life – and it still an ongoing process.

Form an investors perspective:

Did you see any “old” and established media companies in the list of social media drivers?

With the exception of Apple all named companies are rather young and have been funded by Venture Capital investors.

Do you still remember the first mobile game you ever played? And do you still know when you’ve played it the first time? If I remember right it was 2004 (about 5 or 6 years ago) with my Nokia 6310i. I was playing Snake and it reminded me of the first video game.

At the same time while mobile games were monochrome, published on screens and without any thrill millions of people were already playing highly sophisticated and complex video games on consoles and computers.
One group of players was playing complex video games on consoles or on the PC. Another group are casual player. Which means a faster gaming experience, short games, an easy to understand game concept and a fast learning curve within the games and most importantly the possibility to play various games without getting new CD-ROMs or game modules for the PC or console.
The answer was browser games. That’s the reason for the success of the numerous browser game portals (e.g. www.king.com or www.winner.com). Another reason for the success of such portals is the social gaming aspect. Players can play against each other (even for small amounts of money or virtual currencies), they can compare their high-scores and they can communicate.
Fast-forward to today. A mobile phone has turned into a mobile computer as well as into a mobile game console. The iPhone is just the beginning of a paradigm-shift.

I got my first iPhone a year ago and I was amazed about the screen-flow, the graphics, the application and…about all the interesting casual games available on the AppStore. To be honest I became a frequent casual gamer and I started to evaluate this particular market.

Today there are thousands of single player casual mobile games on the Apple AppStore. Some of the games are from large publishers but most of them are from very creative independent games developers.

Compared to the browser games with its social features the mobile games were still single player casual games.
Wasn’t it Nokia who claimed “connecting people”. Sure – if a person is calling another person both are connected. And they are connected with their mobile phones. Lets translate this to the gaming behavior. If one gamer plays a game wouldn’t it be much more thrilling to play against (asynchronous or synchronous) an opponent.
The main task of a game developer is to create the best gamer experience, thrilling games and screen-flows. It’s not his turf to run a transaction server in order to connect numerous gamers with each other.
Well, this task is been solved.

Scoreloop is exactly providing all the functions and features to the game developers. Scoreloop has a back-end-server which processes all challenges, keeps the high-scores, provides game stats to the developers, etc.  The game developer is integrating a lean SDK (software development kit) into his games (developers feedback: “took me an hour”) and his former single player game has been transformed into a social game.
Scoreloop launched its service in April. Only one month later game developers are launching new games with Scoreloop inside on a weekly basis.
I became a big fan of connected mobile games (phones are to connect with people!), some simple data streams out (high-scores, etc) AND links into existing social networks are actually likely to activate a lot of the potential in there.
Single User Mobile Gaming shifted to Social Gaming!

I am screening this particular trend and market since some months and I will share some key findings about social gaming in my next posts.

The animation gives you a brief intro about social gaming:

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/605304]

The summer season is near and the first tournaments will start in May. It’s time to exercise and to the get the final cut. As every year we are going to Mallorca to join the ChampCamp Beach Volleyball Camp:

• 5 days training
• Experiences and well-educated coaches (especially Martin)
• A lot of fun with 80 players

From 1999 until the end of 2006 I founded several technology startups. I am also a business angel and have invested in several startups since 2001. During this time I learned a lot about the startup business. How to raise money? How to build execution driven management teams? How to market products? And how to work with VC’s? (I painfully felt the drawbacks as well as the joys of having a VC investor on the advisory board.) I also learned how to bootstrap a startup as well as how to sell a company (exit). And a lot more…

In 2007 I joined Target Partners, a Munich based Venture Capital firm, as a Venture Partner. Since then I fully immersed myself as an investment professional and was always treated as part of the team. Early this year, I joined Target Partners as a new Partner.

People often ask me how to become a venture capitalist and why I decided to become a VC instead of founding or joining another company. To be honest – it just happened.

After two years of working on the other side of the table as a VC I have to emphazise that this move was a rather large paradigm shift for me. The entrepreneurial mind-set is more like “Yes, I can fix it” or “Come on, just do it”. As a VC I can’t operationally work in a startup as part of management, meaning, “I won’t fix it”. The entrepreneur/management team members are responsible for the operative business. In my new role “I have to let go”. Now, I am standing on the sidelines watching the game and hoping that my advisc, tips and voice might be heard and used by the team.

Seen it – done it

However, let me point out one important quality a VC should have. This insight is based on my work with VC’s as an entrepreneur as well as my experience working as a VC over the last two years:

• A good VC should have an entrepreneurial background.

Sure, there are exceptions, but statistics show that a good VC usually has a background which includes growing companies and/or developing and marketing products and services. Why? Because he will understand the needs, the problems, the daily work of a startup much better than a VC who has only seen it from the sideline and wasn’t part of the game.

Is the entrepreneurial background and experience enough to make a good VC investor? Definitely not! Venture Capital is a detail driven business, which demands additional talents and skills (e.g. curiosity, networking, accuracy, gut feeling, readiness and a lot more).

Conclusion: It was the right move

During the last two years I have enjoyed working with driven and enthusiastic entrepreneurs. I have seen interesting business cases and some not so interesting ones. I will focus on this chapter in an extra post.

This month (March 2009) the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet in 1989. It’s hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it’s even more exciting to think about where it’s going in the future.

Tim still has great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.

One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk about a related concept called Linked Data. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so to put raw data in a standardized format up on the web.

[ted id="484"]

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• Technology trends and the Semantic Web (heyjude.wordpress.com)
• Keep the Semantic Web trusty (semantic-web.at)

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away…

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the **** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of Democracy….

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

By the way – do you understand how the financial crise was generated? Who was/is involved in it? Which motivation was/is the key driver of it?

Easy to understand – hard to believe…
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/3261363]

A major discussion is which solution could be the right one for today’s crisis. Should the governmet increase its spending or should it just lower the taxes?

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute does an excellent job explaining why Keynesian fiscal strategies do not work in this video.

[youtube=http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=VoxDyC7y7PM]

After watching the video I would agree to his arguments. But… the video does not address the central question of whether “Keynesianism” can be used during crisis periods, such as we have now in 2009. According to the video, government spending is always a negative influence.

Another solution would be the Monetarism which has more or less one proposal only – lowering taxes. Why would/could that work? It would put money in the hands of people (usually, that’s good!). But during a crisis, they could be afraid to spend, and nothing happens.

That’s why direct spending by the government could be a potential solution. Spending on roads, schools, research, which involves employing people, keeping factories open, and building what will be useful to free enterprise in the future.

Time will tell…