Mobitrends

Since a few years, if you had an idea the price for creating your first prototype got significantly lower. With a few thousand bucks and a little time you can now come up with a talented team of AD and coders that can turn most of your ideas into working prototypes. I’ve been using this approach now for years letting me rather confront ideas to the market than do old-style market studies that at the end always prove what you want to demonstrate. It’s also a great way to try new business models and validate assumptions.
Apart from my usual subcontractors with whom I built strong bonds over the years, I usually use odesk or rent-a-coder to add new specific skills to my virtual teams. Those services are great but it’s always hard to rely on them for more then a prototyping or proof of concept phase. Usually u get the basics done but the guys there fail when it comes to QA your product decently or meet deadlines. Nevertheless they are a valuable source of cheap workforce !
My point is that today, you can really launch a project with little money and go sell it. This will lead to a new generation of self-funded startups where the entrepreneurs will try to self-finance completely their project and keep a limited burn-rate as long as they can until the customers fund the growth. This is going to reshape completely the entrepreneur job since the “go get funding” stage is no longer compulsory.

These slides are presenting Netflix’s corporate culture. I like this though of a company being able to grow and maintain high performance and flexibility by stressing and developing those values in their HR process and in their daily management.
Definetly worth a thought!

It’s always such an excitement to see a start-up complete its life-cycle by a positive exit. As you know I joined the Steek adventure 3 months ago to create and develop the mobile division. When I first stepped in I discovered a company with talented people really sales-oriented and customer driven. This 7 years old start-up has achieved great goals and with over 2.5 million users it can really play in the carrier playground. Seeing a positive exit as announced today is a positive signal sent to all the other start-ups around : develop the business on your own, deliver stuff that work and you *will* make a success story out of your company.
Congrats to all the team, can’t wait to see how Steek will change F-Secure by bringing our end-user focus and their huuuge salesforce together!

The VR-WEAR modification of the Second Life client never intended to be commercial, and as such we decided to release our modification as a patch to let others contribute to our work.
The modification relies on the integration of the OpenCV library plus a pile of custom filters enabling us to detect specific motions on the user’s head by monitoring the computer’s webcam.
The amazing feedback and the pile of request to release the code are now fulfilled, let me know if you wish to help so we can coordinate the next steps of the project.
The patches for both windows and OSX can be found on the dedicated blog.

As you may now, I’m currently raising a seed round for my latest venture, VR-WEAR (For those whom I didn’t yet pitch, VR-WEAR designs produces and sells Virtual Reality devices for video games). As the French seed market got pretty hard to address since the September crisis and as I’m looking for quite a lot of money (500-700k€ which is pretty big for seed in France) I though I might give a try to those dating sites between angel investors and entrepreneurs and I must confess I’m a bit troubled by the results.
I registered on two of those, Capital PME which is edited by OSEO, the French Innovation agency, and Capangel from a local startup.

First of all it feels always a bit strange to fill so intimate data about your project in those “public” places. I almost feel like now that it’s there I should make a video of the presentation and post in on my blog while I’m at it… and that definitely sounds wrong.
What’s even more puzzling is that a lot of the people viewing my company’s profile obviously are newbies in both technology startups and angel investing which basically leads to pretty heavy differences of point of view. For instance I had a funny talk with one guy who did not spend one sec trying to understand what it is we’re trying to achieve with VR-WEAR but instead only was worrying how we are valuating the company after the September crisis…

While I was thinking those kind of initiatives were pretty meaningful for private investors willing to find some fun projects to invest in as heir risk is really limited thanks to the latest tax savings regulations, after that kind of interactions I’m getting pretty worried that the lack of experience in that very specific field of expertise which is investing in technology startups is going to be a real problem both at the investment phase and afterwards…

What is your opinion ? Should a startup looking for seed be on those uncontrolled websites where anyone can register as an investor and were no check is done on wether one has any capacity of investment and any expertise (or has understood the risks and the usual dynamics of how things usually work) over that specific type of investments?

Update : On CapAngel it seems that I must send out an invitation code to anyone willing to access my company profile – sounds reasonable… It’s not how Capital PME handles it though.

Leweb before party – Opencoffee

Mise en ligne par alexksso

Nice warm-up party tonight at Opus Café organized by Opencoffee France, lots of entrepreneur friends from all over Europe and a good time to start the “catching-up” thing.

Release day today for VR-WEAR with a huge announce, we finally got OSX support in our RC3, and it works great (finally I don’t have to bootcamp under XP anymore to test-drive the software). For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, VR-WEAR has modified Second Life’s viewer to add support for your computer webcam and uses it to analyse your head motion and attitudes and paste them live on your avatar’s head.
More details on the release are available on sl.vr-wear.com along with the downloads URLs.

Just read this article from PO Carles and it’s really fun to see how so many people are heading in the same direction with different approaches.
Camtrax is using a webcam to detect objects in your hands and have you interact with the game through their motion.
Pros : only requires a webcam
Cons: You need to be far enough from the webcam (i.e. my Macbook webcam only sees the head not the upper body as i’m staying too close), it requires colored stuff to detect and track, it’s not really motion capture i.e. that won’t give you enough data to recreate a proper avatar motion.

At VR-WEAR we are focusing on emotions and body language to give a soul to your avatar and as cajuntechie on Seesmic said “let people see a user through their avatar”. By using a simple webcam we analyze live the facial expression of the user, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and extract qualitative information about its attitude and map them on the avatars face. Webcam is cool for the facial language, but not for the rest of the body though. For that part we have some cool ideas but I won’t disclose them before 2009.

Re: VRW – SL Viewer mod – 0.99 beta 1 public release