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Posts Tagged ‘patric carlsson’

Onerous Post-Bubble Deal Term Reappears

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good article by Scott Austin at WSJ Online on a subject we brought up last week.

“Start-up companies appear to be giving into investor demands of a harsher funding deal term that gained notoriety after the tech bubble burst in the early part of the decade.

According to two separate quarterly reports issued last week from law firms Fenwick & West and Cooley Godward Kronish, venture capital firms are more frequently receiving multiple liquidation preferences that protect them from losing out on investments.

Venture capital firms almost always receive preferred stock when they invest in companies, giving them certain rights over common stock holders, usually the founders and executives. One of these standard rights is a liquidation preference, which gives preferred stock holders the right to get their money back from a company before other common stock holders in an unfavorable sale or liquidation.

But with more companies in trouble, investors are inserting multiple liquidation preferences into term sheets, meaning they could get two times or more the amount of capital they invested. That can create nightmarish capital structures for companies but give them more incentive for them to become successful.”

Read the full article here.

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Fixing Israel’s Life Sciences Industry

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 2, 2009| 1 Comment »

Here is a good article from WSJ online by Jonathan Matsey.

The Israeli life science industry was in the spotlight recently, when Medtronic Inc. agreed to pay $325 million up-front for Netanya-based Ventor Technologies Ltd., which had raised $17 million in venture financing in part from Pitango Venture Capital. While the deal was great for Ventor’s investors, Rafi Hofstein, chairman of Hadasit Bio-Holdings Ltd., a publicly traded tech-transfer company for Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, said it highlights a problem with the country’s life science industry: the inability to develop home-grown companies to fruition. And despite the global economic downturn and the re-location of many of the country’s drug and device companies overseas, Hofstein said government policy – and a possible $240 million public-sponsored biotech fund – may ultimately reignite Israel’s life science industry.

Read the full article here

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Venture Capital and Startups Feel More Pain, Study Says

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2009| 2 Comments »

“Startup valuations are falling and venture capitalists are driving harder bargains, according to a survey by California law firm Fenwick & West.

Like the rest of the economy, the world of venture capital and startups is starting to feel more pain from the deepening global financial crisis. That’s the main takeaway from a new survey detailing trends in venture capital investments during the fourth quarter of 2008 by the California law firm Fenwick & West.

The survey, which analyzed the terms of venture deals for 128 companies headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, found that valuations are falling for startups and that venture capitalists are driving harder bargains. The silver lining: The fallout so far is not nearly as bad as it was during the dot-com bust, when hundreds of companies went under and stratospheric valuations came crashing down to earth.

Down Rounds on the Rise

Sure, there were some startups last quarter that secured a higher value on their latest investment round, such as online vacation rental site HomeAway. But, of the 128 companies that received financing, 33% of them experienced so-called down rounds, or an investment that placed a lower valuation on the company than it received in the previous round of investment. More ominous, the percentage of down rounds rose every month at year’s end, hitting 45% in December. “Each month things got worse in the fourth quarter,” says Barry Kramer, the Fenwick & West partner who runs the survey. The highest percentage of down rounds occurred in the first quarter of 2003, when 73% of the companies surveyed by Fenwick & West suffered down rounds.”

Read the full article by Spencer E. Ante here
Other comments on this piece can be found here: World Tech News, The Livermore report, Silobreaker,

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Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Intellectual capital, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Technology, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.

I recently finished a iPhone project with a company out of Sweden, Resolution Interactive. My task was to reshape the business model from traditional PC- online to something fruitful. Coming into to the company early last spring, the finances was well below bad, the team was in dissaray, and the revenues where nill. When iPhone developer program then came available in mid april, we saw the chance and made a jump for it. Although pretty messy to begin with, Apple continued to publish supporting materials, reached out with a network of visionaries and helped us go through the ups and downs of discovering a new market, new business model and new way of marketing.

When we in mid October release the first game – Clusterball Arcade – we received som good reviews and quickly went for title nr. two – AquaMoto Racing. Succesful in my mission, I was able to create a new businessmodel and find a new market for a struggling game company – this with the help of Apple and iPhone.

So, the release of Android from Google, the OVI initiatives from Nokia etc. are all good, but I wonder if they really will be able to provide the multitude of support that Apple was able to provide to me. Also, the unified developer environment (Xcode), the one device, clean business model and pre-existing audience to market too makes it very hard to understand how anyone will be able to compete with Apple on this market segment.

Mark Sigal just posted a excellent article at GigaOm. His analysis below summed this up very clear to me:

“The reality is that openness is just an attribute -– it’s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It’s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective.”

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10 Potentially Game-Changing Games for 2009

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

What games stand the best chance of changing the broader industry in 2009, either by dramatically influencing what consumers play and purchase, or by demonstrating the commercial viability of new revenue models and genres? Below is a list of the 10 most likely candidates, culled from several experts in the field and myself. Keep an eye on these titles to see how well they perform — and whether they really do impact the future business of games. All are scheduled for 2009 release, but of course, dates are always subject to change.

The Games:

Allstate’s “Insight” Games
A series of “serious games” sponsored by Allstate that are designed to gauge reaction time and perception, the insurance company is currently testing them on older drivers, and may use them as a resource for offering discounts to successful players (who are assumed to be better insurance risks).

The Beatles Video Game
The upcoming music game from Harmonix is set for a 2009 holiday season release, and will fully integrate music from the Beatles’ massive catalog, with creative input from Sir Paul McCartney himself.

EyePet
“EyePet uses augmented reality technology to insert a virtual pet into a live camera feed of whatever room the camera is pointed at, and advanced motion and shape detection to make it interact convincingly with its virtual environment,” notes Thor Jensen.

EyePet
“EyePet uses augmented reality technology to insert a virtual pet into a live camera feed of whatever room the camera is pointed at, and advanced motion and shape detection to make it interact convincingly with its virtual environment,” notes Thor Jensen.

Free Realms
Now in beta, this is an MMORPG aimed at kids from Sony Online Entertainment, and “represents a new area both in terms of demographic and business model for SOE,” Cole said.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the DS
The enormously popular Nintendo DS generally skews to very young gamers or older consumers who enjoy Brain Training and the DS’s many other “eduplay” games.

Killzone 2
Is the epic shooter and PS3 exclusive the last, best hope to revive Sony’s ailing console?

Lego Universe
Thor Jensen believes the upcoming MMORPG has the best chance to become the world’s most popular one.

Noby Noby Boy
A strange, nay, near indescribable game from the creator of the bizarre cult masterpiece Katamari Damacy, it’s a downloadable title for the PlayStation Network, and if it’s successful, Washburn foresees a renaissance for indie games, which usually earn far less significant profit margins than AAA mainstream games.

Scribblenauts
Developed for the Nintendo DS, Jensen described it as a traditional side-scrolling platform game that very cleverly incorporates the DS stylus control and word-recognition technology: write “ladder” on the touchscreen, for instance, and a realistic, usable ladder materializes in front of you.

Wii Sports Resort
Sequel to the popular but modest Wii Sports, David Cole sees the follow-up as a consumer loyalty test for Wii’s many casual users.

Read the full article here at NY Times.

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