EVE Fanfest 2012 - EVE Forever trailer

[Original post written @http://startupiceland.wordpress.com]

This was EPIC to say the least. It was my first EVE Fanfest, thank you Hilmar for inviting me. I got to see the true awesomeness that has been created by the CCP team. Congratulations! I was mesmerized, and it took me back a long time when I was fascinated by video games and how I spent endless hours playing games although I did not have access to the latest or the greatest, I got hooked. I have been resisting the temptation of getting back to playing games. I have to say EVE Online and Dust 514 look incredibly attractive. First of all, there were a couple of announcements that I think was incredible,

1. DUST 514 will be the first AAA game to be totally free on Sony PS3 platform
2. DUST 514 and EVE online are linked, what does this mean? this means CCP has really broken ground in integrating a first person shoot out game with a massively multi player strategy and battleship game. It has never been done before! In addition to that the level of details that has gone into developing the avatars, the space ships, the engine, the missile launch systems is just simply mind blowing. CCP has truly shown leadership and broken new ground in gaming.
3. What was fascinating to me was how involved the gamers were in the entire show. CCP has shown incredible strength and maturity in allowing the players in the game dictate how the game should be run. To seal that strategy they have formed what is called as the Council of Stellar Management, which is a democratic way in which the players in the game get elected to represent all players. The CSM meets with the CCP leadership and the Game development teams to provide feedback and raise issues. This is truly innovative and I would like to say a small company called Clara which has been working with CCP for more than 18 months is helping CCP. Full disclosure, I am one of the investors in Clara, made me really proud looking at Jon Lander, the Product owner of EVE online show the word cloud generated from CLARA to describe how CCP takes Community interface seriously and how they engage with their players. It basically validated our business hypothesis that gamers and players of the game really are the true heroes in this new world. The gamers define the agenda and develop the eco-system.

Related articles

• EVE Fanfest to livestream keynotes from tonight (vg247.com)
• CCP shifts gears from DUST to EVE at Fanfest 2012 (massively.joystiq.com)
• EVE Fanfest talks Inferno, World of Darkness panel later today (massively.joystiq.com)
• Eve Online Fanfest 2012: Watch It Here! (rockpapershotgun.com)
• CCP premieres new Dust 514 gameplay at EVE Fanfest keynote (vg247.com)

Strategies to Test Business Hypothesis - 6th Meetup

We had our 6th Meetup @Cafe Solon last evening. We once again had a very good turn up, around 30 people. The topic of the discussion was Strategies to Test Business Hypothesis, which was a follow up from last week's meet topic "Business as a Hypothesis", here are the Notes to that meetup and follow up write up. Björn Brynjar Jónsson, give a 5 minute brief talk about a topic of interest that he wanted to share with the group. The topic that he talked about was from the book "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek. It was very interesting and inspiring. Björn talked about the Golden Circle from the book. The premise is that we tend to focus our effort our vision etc on the "What", whereas great leaders who inspire us usually start with the "Why", which refers to the Purpose of why we do the things we do. When we understand the purpose and communicate the purpose we can inspire people to action. He gave the example of Apple. Here is the Video of Simon talking in Tedx.

• We talked about Strategies that were used in Clara to test their business model through the product Vaktarinn. Originally, Clara had not created the software that automatically sources all the digital content and provides the visualization that they do on Textual information. Gunnar explained how they got 10 of their friends to manually enter all the text from different sources into Excel Spreadsheets and then manually created the visualization look and feel on the data to validate if anyone would be interested to buy the product. Their first revenue was in selling that manual work, once they validated that idea they went on to build all the software that powers Clara Insight and Vaktarinn now. This was a quick and dirty way to see if there is a market for what you want to build. 
• The second example was from the company Buuteeq, how the team there validated their hypothesis that Independent Hotel Owners are willing to share their contact details and everything about their hotels to a third party and host their solution on a third party platform. They validated that by creating a Hotel Directory Service for Independent Hotel Owners called Wandari.com. Not only were they able to validate that business hypothesis they also created their customer funnel which they could target and convert into actual paying customers. 
• There was a discussion on a new business hypothesis that Safe Drivers would be willing to save money on their car insurance by allowing a tracking device to be installed in the car. We talked about how this hypothesis can be validated by just creating a web page with a simple button that says "Are you a Safe Driver? If you answered Yes, You can save 30% on your Car Insurance!" Sign up to be the First of the Safe Drivers to take advantage of the offer." Ok, I made the actual sentences up but that is where the discussion was going!
• The 4th business hypothesis was about non-availability of Icelandic Candy on Souvenir shops. One of the participants wanted to create a business on creating an attractive wrapper around the traditional Icelandic Candy and sell it to the Souvenir shops. The group guided her to actually pre-sell the candy to the stores with just using Digital images and depending on the demand she could build up her business. I was so happy to see how excited she was about being able to launch her business by this weekend! Entrepreneurs find the way! 
• Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson shared the story of how they created a business to sell the Eyafjalljokul's volcanic ash. They sold this idea while they were stranded in the airport in London, they just used digital images to create a visualization of a fancy bottle with the Ash in it and they sold it even before the product was ready. Overall a fantastic meetup and the next meetup is going to be on Pivot Stories. 

Related articles

• The Golden Circle Theory - Simon Sinek Discusses How Great Leaders Inspire Action (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)
• Buuteeq, a hotel marketing software startup founded by ex-Microsoft execs, raises $2m (thenextweb.com)

Power of community analytics and predicting elections

Image via Wikipedia

I have written about Clara and their Icelandic PR and Brand monitoring product Vaktarinn. What fascinated me while we were discussing the investment in Clara was a couple of projects that team had done with the technology platform that they had created to analyze community dynamics. Actually, team Clara had blogged about it but  it was all in Icelandic and of course I had to learn from the team.

National Assembly 2009
Right after the collapse of the Financial system in Iceland and before the fall of the then Government, there was a National Assembly organized and it was called Þjóðfundar in Icelandic. This was a cross section of over 1000 people from all walks of life in Iceland and there was a crowd sourcing movement to determine the values  that were important to Iceland as a nation. The values list is published here. Clara's community analytics platform was used on the captured words, discussions and debates.

The team then used the data from National Assembly and took all the speeches made in the Parliament of Iceland by the elected members. They mashed up the data to see the correlation between the words used by the Members of the Parliament and those used by the crowd in the National Assembly. The picture to the right shows the names of the top 5 MPs with the highest correlation and bottom 5 MPs with the lowest correlation. The one with the highest correlation became the Finance Minister of Iceland and 5th highest became the Prime Minister. What is even more interesting is that this analysis was done before the General election. The blog link that I had provided before to the analysis has lots of graphs, the background and description of the analysis. One political party scored very high in the correlation and that was the party that showed the highest growth rate in the number of votes in the general election and took many of the important Ministry appointments. Oh! what one can predict if one had the right tools and data, especially unstructured data.

Related articles

• Iceland's newest political party gets shiny new name (icenews.is)
• New government for Iceland (icenews.is)
• Bulgarians and Romanians finally get equal rights in Iceland (icenews.is)

Clara - Unstructured Big Data Analyzer!

I met the team at Clara in November 2009, they were 6 guys had an interesting idea and they were figuring out how to make a business out of that idea. They had solved the Language problem and had create a seamless way to suck a lot of unstructured text, tag and mash it with user information, analyze sentiment using the Crimson hexagon Artificial Intelligence Algorithm, do fantastic pivots on the data because of the granularity of the meta data behind the data structure and present it beautifully in an intuitive user interface. We invested in them in May 2010, by that time they had launched a product called Vaktarinn.is (Monitor in Icelandic) for the Icelandic market to monitor all digital media, twitter posts, facebook comments, blog posts and community forums. The product was to test the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and they were successful, they quickly started getting corporate customers like Toyota Iceland, Microsoft Iceland and Coca cola Iceland and all the major Icelandic banks who wanted to monitor their Public Relationship image and Brand image. They currently have over 70 customers in Iceland in this product segment However, the original business idea was to go after the online communities associated with Gaming companies.

Having CCP Games in our backyard was very helpful they worked very closely with CCP to develop their flagship product Clara Insight which basically took the entire infrastructure and ran a software as a service business where their customers just gives them access to their closed web forum and the meta data associated with their customers. They have had CCP Games as their customer for the past 14 months in addition to them they have added Sony and Square Enix (both are Fortune 500 companies!). They are in discussion with all the top 10 gaming companies in the world.

They grew the team to 12, established a presence in San Francisco and have been slowing growing the customer base in Iceland for the PR and Media monitoring solution. They have achieved all this in a matter of 18 months. This is just to emphasise the fact that one can build viable businesses in a short period of time and get to the growth stage in 12 to 18 months, they have done it when the whole world has been going to doom and gloom here in Iceland according to Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang. This is for a company that I know a lot about but I have met other companies that are being built as you read this. I believe there is lot more to the Icelandic Startup Scene than what meets the eye!

Related articles

• Group layoffs and bankruptcies continue in Iceland, despite some positive changes (icenews.is)
• Made In Iceland (travelbetweenthepages.com)
• Iceland among the happiest nations (icenews.is)

Resurrecting the blog - Yet Again - Clara will be the focus of this post

I took a long break from writing... I don't know why I do that because there are many topics of interest that I am constantly battling in my head and writing clears that up.

For those of you who have never followed what I have been doing, We invested in an awesome team in Iceland, the company is in the business of Text Analysis and Language Processing and Visualization. I want to document the history of how this company was transformed in a very short period of time with our participation and capital.

Clara, was a promising startup in the house of idea the incubator funded by the University of Iceland and the Government of Iceland. They had boot strapped their way with grants and charity to develop a language processing engine that understood Icelandic. I started working with them at the end of 2009, based on my input the team pivoted... updated their business plan, launched a new product, got some paying customers.

We closed a round of early stage funding their working capital... now the team has grown from 6 to 11. They have added 65+ customers and have started on a journey to setup an office in the Silicon Valley and are close to being cash flow positive. All this in the last 10 months! whoever said startups take time to grow!

This experience planted a seed idea in my head to launch a Venture Capital Fund coupled with a business accelerator program. I have been a student of some of the successful Venture Capitalists out there like Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Mark Suster to name a few. I have been a avid reader of every word they have been writing... it has been a fascinating journey. I even took the courage to meet Fred Wilson when I was in NYC, he was gracious enough to meet with me and share some of his insights.