Thoughts

After the success in San Francisco, now Vizthink comes to Europe, in Berlin. I am helding there a workshop to prepare entrepreneurs to fund a new venture. The idea is to provide them with the knowledge to decide if and when they need outside funding and how to get it.

You are all welcome.

Labels: Business 2.0, Dave, Magazine

DAD has now invested in 11 start-ups, not all of them are Spanish. As a matter of fact, 2 of the most promissing ones are based in the US. There are nevertheless, exciting opportunities in the Spanish Internet.

A few of the early 2000 entrepreneurs have been able to exit their original companies and are now again at it. They are young, very able and understand what makes Internet tic. It provides us with a very good background to back very exciting companies at a very early stage of development.

With the notable exeption of AMAZON, commerce on the net is, mostly, handled by your normal trader. The physical brands have learned to handle the new channel and they control their trade also in Internet.

Yes, I know, there is the digital formats like music and/or video where i-Tunes has re-invented the way music -paid for music that is- is distributed. But I am thinking of traditional goods like a suit. Why is not there yet a network to put together designers, manufacturers, users and distributors to create an environment where, for instance, a Brazilian designer has a new idea about how a suit must fit you, an Italian image consultant sees it and recommends it to an American customer and a Chinese tailor produces it to Fedex it to the customer, at about the same price as a standard suit in Macy´s.

We have yet to explore the possibilities of this type of new digital marketplaces.

We have been using a corporate Wiki for over a year now. It is a very good tool that all DAD (my Spanish incubator) investors appreciate and use to follow on new developments in the company. Recently, we created a second Wiki to provide an exchange Forum to all CEO´s of the 11 companies we have invested in. The result has been very slow to come.


CEO´s of Internet ventures are well known workalholics and a Wiki is not very attractive when you wish to promote dialogue. One of them has suggested we use Google Groups instead. The early results look very promissing. All CEO´s have already registered and the way the groups are handled allow to distribute content to all as continous stream of information, promoting their participation and, at least until you use 100 MB, they are free.

Worth a try.

Let´s face it. We all have very few moments of focused attention. Does your mind walk/flies away while your boss is past his 30th powepoint slide? The problem is that we still have the same minds as a hundred years ago and, the environment has grown with information noice at a pace we cannot cope with.

Is therefore the "Attention" our most valuable asset? How do we gain attention from friends or partners, privately or in business? Does the use of Visual Graphics help? Both Dave Gray and me believe they do. There are still very few companies out there that understand how Visual thinking can change the way they communicate with their employees and those with their customers.

We need to promote a Visual Thinking revolution that created companies with visual thinkers in their communication departments and teach employees to use visual graphics to gain customer´s attention, retain it and promote action.

This will also affect the way eBay, for instance, will deal with its "power sellers" or Amazon with its associated shops. The problem is, at present, too many general purpose social networks and very few "very focus" ones.