About Jean-Baptiste Su

Recent Posts by Jean-Baptiste Su

Gamification Keeps Users Socially Engaged

Last week, the first Gamification Summitconvened in San Francisco bringing together many different segments of the Silicon Valley technology market. The “Game Crawl” organized by TechCentralSF after the conference gave attendees a chance to mingle.

The most surprising part of the event was the large cross section of industries represented. There was the expected influx of game and startup executives but also NBC, Playboy Enterprises, a program insurance company, and healthcare companies. Gamification is seen by these executives as the new loyalty program and a way to keep users/consumers engaged.

Social engagement is no longer seen to be enough, adding game mechanics and metrics is the new thing in the next year for brands.

Powering these new take on loyalty programs are two startups that sponsored.

Badgeville described their business as a white label social rewards and analytics platform, a new twist on the traditional loyalty program. Now you can reward consumers not just for purchases but also desired behaviors like “sharing with social network” or “uploading content”.

Bunchball has been building its platform for the past 4 years and power programs for large brands like NBC, Comcast, USA Networks,SyFy, and Hasbro. The API’s make it easy to plug in a game, leaderboards, and integration with social networks.

By Chia Hwu. 

Facebook Moves Campus to Menlo Park (video)

Facebook announced today it plans to move its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to a campus in Menlo Park, formerly occupied by Sun Microsystems.

According to Facebook CFO David Ebersman, the company has been looking for a new space since it outgrew its downtown Palo Alto offices in 2009. “We feel it’s really important to have our employees in one location that
maximizes their ability to interact with one another, that leads to better sharing of ideas, better energy throughout the company. And we are already reaching the point with the facilities we have in Palo Alto where we won’t be able to fit. And so what we were seeking was a place where we could put everybody [including co-founder Mark Zuckerberg] together in one place,” says Ebersman.

The new/old campus was built between 1993 and 1995 and served as the corporate headquarters for Sun Microsystems until its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The campus occupies 57 acres and contains 9 buildings totaling about 1 million square feet. Which can host more than 3,500 employees, according to Facebook’s director of global real-estate, John Tenanes.

As of the end of 2010, Facebook had 2,000 employees worldwide, with over 1,400 live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Facebook also purchased an adjacent 22-acre tract at 312 and 314 Constitution Drive that is connected to the campus by a tunnel, underneath the Bayfront Expressway, for possible future development as a subsequent expansion phase.

Employees will move to the new campus in waves, with the first group moving in June or July this year. Facebook will still continue to occupy its offices in Palo Alto through 2011 and possibly into 2012. The lease of the current campus officially ends in 2013, while Facebook signed a 15-yr lease for Menlo Park, with an option to purchase it entirely in 5 years from now.

Below is an exclusive tour of the old Sun campus filmed today as it is being renovated and still occupied by some Oracle/Sun employees:

And more details on the planned move by Facebook’s director of global real-estate, John Tenanes:

Filed under: news

Latest Trends: Venture Capital Industry Not Scalable

In 2010, venture capital firms raised $12 billion (down from $16B in 2009) and invested $22 billion (up from $18B). For PricewaterhouseCoopers Steve Bengston, who spoke this morning at SDForum’s Quarterly Venture Breakfast, this is simply not sustainable.

Good News: deals are up — According to the MoneyTree report which tracks venture capital investing, venture capitalists invested $21.8 billion in 3,277 deals in 2010, an increase of 19% in dollars and a 12% rise in deals over the prior year. More here.

“2010 was a kind of a funny year… 3 flat quarters and one outlier which is really more of function of about 3 huge cleantech deals, so it wouldn’t be too much off the mark to say that 2010 was a bunch of $5 billion quarters,” explains Bengston.

Bad News: weak IPO market, lack of funds, no jobs, shrinking VCs, China

“The problem with venture capital is not how much (deals) is coming in, but how much it’s coming out,” says Bengston talking about the lack of IPOs.

Also, 2010 saw the biggest delta between VC investing and VC fund raising ($12B), the lowest since 2004. It’s not scalable!

On jobs, Silicon Valley saw no net job creation in 15 years!

“Here’s a period arguably the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of civilisation and there is no more jobs today than there were 15 years ago,” adds Bengston.

VC industry is shrinking:

“There’s a prominent VC that did their own study that claims that 97% of VC profits come from 15 companies each year. Now let’s say it’s only 90% coming from 30 companies. But it still begs the question: how many VCs do you need to find the 30 really good companies each year. Today the answer is: about 2000; and you might think it’s more than you need.”

On China:

“David Rubinstein, the CEO of Carlyle, was quoted recently saying that China was the #1 economy in 15 of the last 18 centuries. So, just because they had a couple of bad centuries, you don’t want to rule them out. They have a history of success.”

Other highlights of  2010 venture investing:

• Silicon Valley: 40% of the total VC investments, up from 23% in 1995
• 30 years ago, Boston was the mecca for venture capital investing
• Silicon Valley took over Boston about 15 years ago
• Now, Southern California is emerging as the next big area that might eventually eclipse Boston in a year or 2
• But no new net creation of jobs in Silicon Valley in the last 15 years
• About 200 series A deals (~$1 billion invested) per quarter
• Most of the money has been going in later stages, expansion rounds
• There were even “N” rounds of investing in 2010!
• Top active VC: Kleiner Perkins with 79 deals, over a deal/week; then First Round Capital and NEA
• Intel is the only corporation that has ever made the “Most Active VC” list
• 72 IPOs in 2010 vs 12 in 2009 or 6 in 2008; timid come back
• 274 mergers and acquisitions, the biggest since at least ’04; but low valuations
• Advertising is migrating to the Web and reach 20% of the $600 billion market
• Asian millionaires exceeds European millionaires  

Korea Opens Software Centre in Silicon Valley

No doubt that, despite  the global economic slump, Silicon Valley still attracts the world’s most brilliant technology minds and their innovative start-ups. And this time, it’s time for Korea’s software industry to make the move.

Unlike their hardware counterparts like Samsung, LG, Hyundai or Daewoo, Korean software companies have not achieved any kind of global recognition for their products and services.

But today’s opening of the Korea Software Promotion Centre in San Jose, Calif., by the Korean Trade and Investment Agency (KOTRA) might challenge the status quo.

In establishing this new centre – the second after Tokyo – the Korean government intends to promote and assist the most promising Korean software companies, through value added services including localisation, marketing, business development, participation in industry conferences and tradeshows, etc.

For the Korea Software Promotion Centre grand opening KOTRA chose what it considered the ten hottest Korean B2B software companies, from software tools to database products, from transportation payment systems to mobile GUI embedded solutions and tools, to DRM security and control or USIM Smart Card solutions. And Korea’s most promising software companies are:

• DigitalAria: creates 2D & 3D graphic user interface-FXUI™ for embedded devices including Mobile Phone, Car AVN UI, CE and etc. .
• ESTsoft: provides PC utilities, ALTools; BizHard, a web storage solution for SMB; Internet Disk, a web storage solution; and CABAL online, a MMORPG.
• Fasoo: the largest independent DRM vendor and holds most DRM developers in Asia.
• Infinitt: provides affordable, state-of-the-art medical imaging and information capabilities for Radiology, Cardiology, Orthopedics and Dental healthcare facilities.
• Insprit: developed a “convergence” platform to manage & control various convergence-devices inside the home network as well as outside
• JIRAN Soft: develops security software like SpamSniper (anti-spam), CoolMessenger (Secure Business IM) and OfficeHARD (Secure Online Storage Solution)
• LG CNS: it’s team of 7,000 IT professionals provides IT services including SI (System Integration) & NI (Network Integration), outsourcing, etc
• Solacia: the first to commercialise the Dual-USIM card technology that will be used in all WCDMA, HSDPA and WIMAX Devices.
• Somansa: it’s Mail-i solution solution monitors, archives, and retrieves in/out going messages and data from corporate e-mail, personal web mail, FTP, Telnet, IM, Twitter, Web bulletin, P2P, Tunnel, Proxy, Terminal, and bypassing traffic via Port 80
• and Ware Valley: develops 3rd party solutions for database security, database vulnerability assessment and database management & monitoring

How NYT Gadget Guy Almost Lost His Job Using MS Office Mac 2011!

It’s a true story that just happened last week to New York Times tech columnist David Pogue!

Using Pogue’s own description, Office Mac 2011 is “buggy”, “un-stable”, “problematic”, and “missing features.” Something he experienced first hand when Outlook for Mac failed several times to send his review of the Microsoft software to his editor’s work email account (the one set by default) and got him almost sacked!

So before upgrading to Microsoft’s latest office suite for Mac, make sure to watch the video below first:

PayPal: Absolutely No Plans To Go IPO

At the PayPal X conference in San Francisco, PayPal president Scott Thompson confirmed once more that the San Jose, Calif.-based company has no plans to go IPO anytime soon. “We’re happy to be part of eBay, and I don’t believe that it’s likely to change anytime soon!”

More on eBay-PayPal synergies:

“We have nothing on that front to announce. And in fact, as we’ve said in other occasions, nobody that I know of inside of eBay or PayPal is working in any such strategy… There’s a long long runway of synergies left for these 2 businesses to enjoy together,” says Thompson.

“The one that Bob Swan commented on on our earnings call last week was the growth of our credit business, the BML [Bill Me Later] business inside of PayPal and using the strength of the eBay balance sheet in order to fund that growth in receivables and that is a powerful synergy for both businesses: putting the capital they generate to work to help us grow that part of our business and a very profitable part of our business.”

FailCon: The Art to Fail and Rise Back Again!

I attended FailCon this week in San Francisco. The threat of failure haunts all entrepreneurs, yet discussions about it are scarce. So Executive Producer Cass Phillipps created FailCon to provide an environment where entrepreneurs and technology companies can share their challenges and short-comings, and discuss the best way to prepare for and avoid these in the future.

“I’ve just attended too many events that regurgitate the same success stories over and over,” explains Phillipps. “I realized I can’t do what those people did right – that takes a lot of luck, too. But I definitely can avoid the things they did wrong. So why aren’t they talking more about that?”

FailCon 2010 will cover controversial topics like: “Avoiding and Recovering from Co-Founder Divorce,” “How VCs Handle Failure,” “Surviving The Exit,” “User Privacy,” “Protecting Your Brand,” “Product Disasters,” and “Failures in Digital Communication.”

Speakers included David Pogue of the New York Times, Steve Blank, Philip Kaplan of Blippy, Esther Dyson of EDventures, Cindy Cohn of the EFF, Elad Gil of Twitter, and many more. See the full agenda here.

David Pogue: RIM BlackBerry Storm, A Piece of Crap

During his keynote on consumer products failures, New York Times columnist David Pogue shared his personal RIM nightmare story with the audience here at FailCon.

For Pogue, RIM decided to ship the incomplete Blackberry Storm in the Fall of 2008 because it was under pressure to deliver it to Verizon for the start of the holiday season.

“It [Blackberry Storm] was horrible. It was a piece of crap. It was so filled with bugs, I will be on the phone every day with RIM… It just doesn’t work,” explains Pogue.

But what made this a complete disaster for RIM is it continuously denied that the Blackberry Storm had any problems, despite tons of consumer complaints on the Web and a devastating email Pogue received from one of the Storm team member:

“When you wrote that this product was released prematurely, you were absolutely right, and everybody here knew it… Internally, many of us argued that we would be hurting ourselves by rushing it out the door. Obviously, our managers disagreed,” reads the email.

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