The NVA Blog

Business blogs (like this one) are becoming more and more common and relevant as communication and marketing tools. There are a thousand conversations going on in the blog-o-sphere right now on the topic of how important having a business blog is. Some believe that companies will be left behind if they don’t enter the fray since their competition surely will. A counter arguement is that doing it right is time consuming and non-trivial and should not be taken as a “me too” decision.

Business Week has a good article on this topic posted here. Their headline “Catch Up…or Catch You Later”
Jason Calcanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc. says blog-or-die in his post here, and there is a good discussion on this topic over at BolderBlogs.com.

Business blogs can serve a number of purposes. If you are considering starting one for your company consider the following elements;

• What is the purpose of the blog? What do we want it to do for the company?
• Who dictates/manages what gets posted? Who’s in charge of content?
• Is this another PR machine, or is this a way to engage in conversations with our customers and the public?
• Will you allow public commentary? Will you engage contentious questions or comments with thoughtful responses?
• How frequently will you update the blog? Who gets to contribute content?

What seems to be working is when leaders from companies start personal blogs and talk about the company and themselves. It’s a business blog in a backhanded kind of way, and is effective because of the personalization. The leaders get a forum to share their thoughts in an “unofficial” communication format, but rest assured what gets posted is carefully thought out and crafted.

I’ve had Sonos in the house for over a year now, and blogged about why were impressed here. They released version 2.0 of the software recently, and after playing with it for about two weeks it definitely gets the thumbs up. The biggest new feature is that Rhapsody is now integrated into the controller so that you can browse and play everything in the Rhapsody library as if it was in your own library. The integration is quite nice and performs well. They give you a free 30 day trial, and the service is $10 a month. It’s worth it for many reasons, but the easiest justification is that it will save you money in the long run. (cost of the Sonos system notwithstanding). How many times have you bought an album because you liked 1-2 songs but ended up not being all that impressed with the entire album? How many times have you bought some music, loved it for 3 weeks and haven’t listened to it again since? Rhapsody has a pretty big library at 2+ million songs (iTunes is 3.5m) so the likelihood of them having anything new from a major label is good. You can listen to tons of new music, decide what you like enough to pay for, and purchase media you want the CD or digital files for your iPod, car, etc.

Some other useful Sonos tidbits…

1. Wall Street Journal — last week WSJ gave Sonos the technical innovation of the year award for consumer electronics. Cool!
2. Alarm clock — The new 2.0 software update allows you to use your Sonos system as an alarm clock. Nice stereo fidelity instead of that harsh clock radio sound. Also able to set a different alarm for weekdays vs. weekends, multiple alarms per day, snooze, cancel, wake to music/playlist, etc. Now you have a reason to get another Sonos Zone Player for the bedroom.
3. Rhapsody Playlists - you can save tracks and albums to playlists just like with your own library. My wife love this feature because it makes it very easy to “bookmark” a song or album she liked while listening to one of the Rhapsody radio stations.

Fred Wilson also blogged about the 2.0 updates here and included some good screen shots to boot.

FYI - the 2.0 update is free if you already have the service, you can update the entire system from the controller

Andrew Fife has posted a few tips based on his experience pitching VCs. This is advice I tend to give all of NVA’s clients who are doing fundraising, so it is worth relaying. View Andrew’s entire post here. Bookmark it too - you may think the advice is obvious, but you would be surprised at how often these little things make a big difference. The gist of his tips are:

1. Never send your slide deck in advance of a meeting - to anyone. You’ll spend more time explaining or defending the assumptions the reader has made than pitching.
2. Make the most of your meetings - even if you have a tough meeting and deal with many objections, you can follow up by showing execution of your plan and making sure the VCs see you are hitting your milestones.
3. Timing is everything. Andrew has whittled it down to Wednesday at 10am as being the best time to pitch a VC. Idealistic perhaps, but a good goal. Many VCs have partnership meetings on Monday, which means catch-up on Tuesday, etc.

Another useful tip in this realm is to know whom you are pitching to. Sometimes just getting a meeting at a VC firm is a feat unto itself, and you are thrilled to have ANY meeting. Even so, make sure you know enough about who you are pitching to be sure you have the right audience. Most VCs are “on top of it” and route compelling projects to the partners or associates that are focused on that market, but there are always cases where you won’t realize until 3/4 of the way through a meeting you should be talking to someone else at the firm. Research the VC’s current portfolio, investment history, and market focus.

There has been an increasing buzz in the electric car industry in the last year (destruction of the EVs nonwithstanding), and it is great to see progress being made by private companies, start-ups even, in bringing commerically viable electrics and EV-hybrids to market.

You hopefully have heard of the Tesla electric sports car. It’s a $90k, 0-60 in 4 seconds sportscar built by a slicon valley start up. It’s powered by laptop batteries. (Bring a fire extinguisher with you if you take a test drive - ha!) check out some videos of it here. Pretty impressive!

Another interesting project is the conversion of a BMW Mini to electric (with a gas generator to charge the batteries) by a British company, PML Flightlink, that makes high-power electric motors. The specs are impressive and scary. A 160 hp electric motor at each wheel, with a 0-60 of 4.5 seconds. No mechanical brake (motors provide ABS-powered braking). Can run 900+ miles with the help of the motor, or 4 hours in an urban setting on the batteries. Some blog commenters are quite suspect about the whole thing, but if the company stands behind the numbers then I’ll play along for now.

This car will not go to production, but is a great example of forward thinking and technology convergence. It’s a proof-of-concept that helps demonstrate the viability of electric+ICE cars that are not sluggish and slow and that these systems can be adapted to existing vehicles. There are certainly some issues with this car (blog commenters are having a field day).

• the motors add unsprung weight to the vehicle - bad for driving and handling performance
• the ICE (internal combustion engine) that charges the whole thing doesn’t run on a non-carbon fuel like biodiesel
• it’s a prototype, which is great to help advance the industry but doesn’t get “green” vehicles into the hands of the consumer
• no mechanical brake! what happens when the driveline firmware hits a bug or the thing runs out of juice?

There are some fundamental economic and political issues still impacting the adoption of green and electric/hybrid vehicles it seems. Conflicting reports come out frequently on Ethanol as a alternative fuel, and what happens in 50 years when there are millions of leaking batteries all over the street?

It is great to see silicon valley get into the mix along with the more traditiona players. I’m hoping cars like the Tesla can be brought to market for the masses. If we can manage to charge our electric cars with wind or solar…we might be on to something.

There is perhaps no web site launched in the last 6 months that better signifies our arrival at bubble 2.0 than that of Dogster.com, a site where dogs and their owners can have a webpage. Sound silly? Rediculous even? Not to the millions of passionate dog lovers out there who have felt their cannine friends are under represented online and have no real means of networking with their furry friends. As it turns out they are doing pretty well, and backed by a suprising number of recognizable names. Check out the list of angel investors listed on a related post on VC Confidential, not to mention comments that they are “kicking ass”. There are over 200,000 dogs registered so far, with 600+ added yesterday. That’s almost a million paws…

Social networking for dogs has taken off, and is making money on ad revenues. This is good news for folks starting up ad supported “niche” web sites I suppose. I have to wonder if it’s all part of a hype cycle and when the novelty fades and people go back to their routines, if the doggie blog traffic will collect dust like a forgotten bone under the porch.

Stay tuned, someday soon catster.com (also owned by the same company) and dogster.com will need to merge and become pawster.com.

Update: Andrew Fife pointed out that the site has been around since 2004, which shows not only staying power (or deep pockets) but good vision to take social networking elements to the pet market early on.