Tony Perkins, organizer and founder of the Venture Summit Silicon Valley.
Target audience: Startups, mature businesses, technology innovators, funders and venture capitalists, marketers.
I‘m just back from the Venture Summit Silicon Valley (“where Big Ideas meets Big Money”). And so here’s a short report from the frontlines of the key players — entrepreneurs, firms and investors — powering the Innovation Economy.
Let’s start with this Flickr set of 51 photos — you’ll recognize some of the speakers, like TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins (the conference’s impresario) and other notables from the tech world.
The 250 to 300 folks who turned out at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay were a mix of business executives, VCs and startup founders. I was here to report some highlights for Socialmedia.biz as well as to soak in some wisdom around social data for the geolocation start-up I’ve begun working on, Placely.
If I got any of the details here wrong, or if you have any additions, please add your comments below.
Jay Smit on Instagram, ‘Glee’ and Pandora
• Some brilliant insights from keynoter Jay Samit, president of ooVoo: “There’s a big difference between value creation and value capture. It’s important to capture the value you create.”
• Samit on the genius of Instagram: “They made every idiot with a camera feel like an artist.” Also worth noting: “The majority of photos taken by humans in last 150 years were taken in the last 14 months.”
• Best line of the conference, again from Samit: “There is no little kid hoping there’ll be a laptop with Windows 8 under the Christmas tree.”
• Over 40 percent of all videos viewed on YouTube are music videos, he said.
• More Samit: The cast of “Glee” has had more songs on the charts than the Beatles.
• “Voice is not one of the top three uses of your smartphone,” he noted. Nor is mobile about repurposing content from the first screen onto the second screen.
• Samit on the uncertain fate of Pandora: “Even if Pandora gets a billion users, they won’t make enough to pay the evil music companies.”
• What’s big that’s coming down the pike? Video chat, he said.
Highlights, takeaways and factoids
• Overheard: “We’re in the home run business.”
• 20% of seeded startups go on to get a VC round.
• The power of social media was on display in a study cited by a panelist discussing online video: People care more that a friend has watched and recommended a video than the fact that 1.5 million people have watched it.
• Perhaps the best demo I’ve ever seen came from Matt Serletic, CEO of Music Mastermind, whose debut product Zya is a DIY/mashup music creation tool that has to be seen to be believed.
• Several speakers pointed to the $20 billion gap between mobile spending on small screens and where companies are spending their advertising dollars today (traditional media). Consumers are leading, and heading to new digital outposts, while businesses are lagging.
• “The cloud mobile social wave is where the next generation of innovation and disruption is coming from.”
• Revenue growth for 2012: 42.6% by Google, 35% by the younger and more social Facebook.
• LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was channeled: “It’s not about who you know, it’s about who they know.”
• Every day 8 years’ worth of data is uploaded to YouTube. Some 200 million YouTube videos are viewed on mobile devices every day. “You can argue that YouTube is the new new network,” Perkins said. “Down in Hollywood they’re scared, and they’re coming after YouTube, big time.”
• Perkins also noted that Google was the 14th search engine. “So that should dispel the first mover myth.”
• Nearly 3 billion people are on the Internet. Counting the mobile Internet, it’s over 3 billion.
• Online games will double to a $30 billion market by 2016.
• From the stage: “Pick your mobile app startup. It may be a gamble but it may be the next Facebook or Rovio.”
• Paul Deninger, senior managing director, Evercore Partners: “The market cap of Amazon and eBay are four times what they were at the height of the Internet bubble.”
• More Deninger: “A company can be a really good company and a really bad stock. … It’ll be three years before Facebook recovers to its IPO price, if it ever does.” Several speakers, like Perkins, said Facebook could be a good buy now; “just put it in your back pocket.” Me? I’m not so sure Facebook will have as many U.S. users two years from now as it does today. Still, as Venture Capitalist of the Year Jim Breyer of Accel Partners (and an early Facebook investor) said, “1 billion users was Facebook’s most profound milestone.”
• Market intelligence tip: You can find out if someone applied for a patent similar to yours and was rejected by the US Patent Office.
• Today we’re back to a normal and healthy $15 billion to $20 billion levels of VC investments vs. $100 billion at the height of the tech bubble in 2000.
• “The cloud mobile social wave is where the next generation of innovation and disruption is coming from.”
8 rules of Big Data
Keynoter Andreas Weigend, head of Stanford University’s Social Data Lab and former chief scientist at Amazon, offered the business and tech communities these eight rules for handling and leveraging Big Data:
- Collect everything.
- Give data to get data.
- Start with the problem, not with the data.
- Focus on metrics that matter to your customers (and not to your lawyers or accountants, he added).
- Drop irrelevant contraints (for example, if you segment audiences only for legacy reasons, stop doing it).
- Embrace transparency (“Build a business on allowing people to do and share stuff. Appoint a chief sharing officer.”)
- Make it trivially easy for people to connect, contribute and collaborate.
- Let people do what people are good at and computer do what computers are good at.
Second best chuckle of the conference from Weigend: “Instead of data privacy, your company should have a data promiscuity officer. Let your data go.”
More Weigend: “Research has left the universities and is now at Google, Amazon and Facebook.” See his Stanford lecture notes.
Final highlights and takeaways
• Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalpytus Systems and former CEO of MySQL (whom I’ve quoted in the past at the Web 2.0 Summit): “If you’re trying to make money, you probably won’t make a difference.”
• Mickos: “The cloud means we’re rewriting the infrastructure of computer systems. First we broke up the client side [with things like Google Docs], now we’re breaking up the server side.”
• Three rules for cloud designs: “They have to be easy to adopt, agile and elastic,” he said.
• Final tidbit from Mickos: “Linux used to be the place where all the smart kids would go. Today all the smart kids go to Amazon AWS.”
• Interesting that I heard the word Pinterest mentioned only once. Google, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn, on the other hand, were omnipresent.
• One speaker’s prediction on what we’ll see by 2020: “Continuous health monitoring, and 3D printing will be widespread.”JD Lasica is founder of Socialmedia.biz. We work with large and mid-size businesses and organizations on social media strategies and optimizing your online presence. Contact JD by email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.
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