As i mentioned in an old post before, Angelsoft is a New York based company which has become an online ecosystem where investors and entrepreneurs meet to build new companies. Due to its name, Angelsoft was about Angel Investors.After they released version 3.0 , their platform became easier but more powerful. With version 3.4 release, Angelsoft is welcoming VCs into the Angelsoft Network.They’ve launched new power features that can help the venture capitalists streamline the process easier. As it happened in all releases, the interfaces are ipmroved and lots of bugs fixed.

2008 Stats

Angelsoft is an alive and transparent platform and has lots of transactions, so the stats from Angelsoft are reliable enough to represent the industry. I think the most important stat is “invested submissions rate” . As you see, very small number of companies  who apply get funded. This shows how hard being an entrepreneur is. Getting an investment doesn’t mean that you will be successful. The success rate of a startup is very low, too. Half of the startups fail within two years and then the others in the next three years. Average four year – survival rate of a startup is under 40% . There are 442 angel groups and VCs and 14,900 investors in the Angelsoft Ecosystem and Angelsoft processes over 2,100 funding applications a month. Since May 2008, 37,000 + deals made, about 2,000 events occured, 150,000 documents attached.

Doubling Investor Community Activity

One of the most important need of the entrepreneurs is promoting their plans to the investor community. Angelsoft listened to them and took steps to help them out which resulted in a doubling of the number of views that the Investors receive. The feedback form both investors and entrepreneurs have been positive as well which means a win-win situation. Investors now receive an email bi-weekly with the 5 closest and 5 highest rated deals.

Industry Valuations

As the graph at the above shows, the average amount of funds being sought differs between 25% – 35% of the pre-money valuation estimated by entrepreneurs for their companies. The graph also shows us that the valuation is decreasing but the rate of the funds sought is increasing. This means,

• The prices are getting down in the early stage investment industry,
• Entrepreneurs are aready to share more of their companies with the investors.

Conclusion

These new features are a major step forward in improving the funding process for entrepreneurs and investing process for investors. These days, you can see angel investors and VCs coinvesting on deals more often. Both the VCs and angels need each other and this relationship will be more important in the future. It’s a smart action to bring VCs on board and Angelsoft platfrom has become a better place for entrepreneurs and angel investors to be able to meet more people.

* All the data and the images used in this article are the property of Angelsoft.

Michael Arrington’s Web 2.0 news blog TechCrunch is a huge success in the blogosphere. It has now more than 1700k (1,7 million) daily RSS readers, ranked as 2nd most popular blog by Technorati and has a traffic rank of 3530 in the world. I wonder if Michael Arrington was dreaming this excellent situation when he started TechCrunch in June, 11, 2005.

TechCrunch in 2005

TechCrunch has a become a digital brand and a news source for most of the blogs like our SiteBoat. TechCrunch has had different designs in the three and a half year period. Approximately on its first birthday, TechCrunch started to have the fresh look based on the harmony of green and white and its actual was born.

TechCrunch in 2006

In August, 2008; the TechCrunch team redesigned their page and cleaned things up and switched over to an “excerpt” format to let users to het a taste of the posts on the homepage before diving into read them in full. The new minimalist approach to design has meant more whitespaces and less loading time.

TechCrunch Redesign in 2008

As 2009 comes, TechCrunch’s minimalist design changes again. By the new design, the ad spaces seem to be optimized and the homepage has started to have a magazine-style look. The featured posts of the week take place over the homepage but this new thing needs to be improved.  The loading time of the homepage is reduced and i liked the black- colored top bar.  Briefly, this new year makeup gives a simple but fresh look to TechCrunch.

* We wish you a happy new year with health and success in your business.

TechCrunch in 2009

AMEE is London, UK based startup that aims to enable the calculation of the carbon footprint of everything. AMEE is a web 2.0 service and provides a common platform that combines calculation, measurement, profiling, transactional systems and represents carbon emissions data from over 150 countries. AMEE’s motto describes its mission the best: “the world’s energy meter” .

Emission trading is an administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. It is sometimes called cap and trade (Source: Wikipedia). The Kyoto Protocol is a 1997 international treaty which came into force in 2005, which binds most developed nations to a cap and trade system for the six major greenhouse gases. Carbon trading is sometimes seen as a better approach than a direct carbon tax or direct regulation.

Emission trading is at the core of AMEE. AMEE is designed to open up data for making it easy to access by serving an API. This API helps each organisation to create their own branded front-end  to their campaigns, but rely on the same standart data format. For instance, Morgan Stanley has extended their in-house CO2 calculator, built on AMEE to help their stuff to better understand their own carbon footprint, and to pledge action to reduce thie energy use and cut emissions.

Last month, Union Square Ventures,  O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures has invested in Amee and TAG together invested in AMEE. Cases like the approach of AMEE excite me very much and i see day-to-day Web Meets World more, as Tim O’Reilly says.

One of the meanings of Web 2.0 is the shift in the way the Internet is used for finding what you need in a fast, interactive and creative way. So what can you do if you need a Web 2.0 talent or to promote yourself as a Web 2.0 talent? The answer comes from Web 2.0 itself and called Who’s Web.

Who’s Web is a nice mashup of Google Maps and a database of Web 2.0 talents like web developers, designers, web marketers or project managers and developed by Xilinus. Web 2.0 events can also be seen on Who’s Web. You can zoom in this map with your mouse or type into the search box.

The front page of Who’s Web consists of a global Google Map full of indicators showing Web 2.0 talents in the related district. You can find easily Web 2.0 talents in your area, you can promote yourself via Who’s Web or you can organize local Web 2.0 events like meetings or barcamps.

Who’s Web offers its members a profile page to promote themselves on a Google map interface with a brief information about their jobs.

Who’s Web can help you to extend your local network by contacting experts and passionate Web people. I think it’s worth subscribing to Who’s Web by filling this one-minute registration form, but Who’s Web itself needs web marketing activities to increase its awareness.

Front page

Personal Page

If you’re thinking to start an investment or still trying to develop a business, ‘consumer trends‘ is one of the key terms you must watch carefully. A consumer trends report is a must-use tool for entrepreneurs, investors and business developers. Especially, in this crisis situation with consumer spending down, it has become more important to target the right audiences to achieve the right goals. There are a lot of consultancy and research firms publishing consumer trend reports. Trendwatching.com is one of these firms.

trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm located in Amsterdam, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. Reinier Evers; a trend watcher, a presenter and and an entrepreneur founded trendwatching.com in 2002 in Amsterdam. trendwatching.com is an innovative trend firm. What makes trendwaching.com unique is its source of information. Traditional trend reports rely on public surveys and direct sales datas. But trendwatching.com’s source of information is its network.

Past trends can be easily determined statistically, but the hard point is to predict the future trends. Trends are set by people and trendwatching.com has discovered this fact and implemented in their strategy of gathering information from people about future trends. The Springspotter Network, trendwatching.com’s global network of spotters, has 8,000 members in 100+ countries worldwide. These members are the ones who recognize new business ideas and cool & new trends. Anyone can join this network and accepted contributions get rewarded with cool gifts. This is a very interesting and innovative way to collect information from all over the world and this business model worth writing another article.

trendwatching.com publishs monthly trend briefings and annual trend report . More than 160,000 professionals in over 120 countries subscribe trendwatching.com’s free monthly Trend Briefing. This is the number one briefing of its kind in the world. Once a year, trendwatching.com releases a Trend Report, highlighting the emerging trends that will matter in the next 12-18 months. The 2009 version has been released at 17th November.

This report is not a free but it’s worth paying for its $799 or €599 price. The report includes 150+ slides and exclusive videos, outlining important changes in consumer needs and wants. More than half of the companies buying the report consists of B2C companies.

Let’s look at some of the interesting featured trends in this report:

• FAKETASTIC
• URBANY
• ADOPT A CONSUMER
• SOLITARY SNACKS
• GENERIC LUXURY
• RAW & SEE THROUGH
• UBER & ECO
• BEAT THE RECESSION
• MICRO-SCOPE
• FSTR

In conclusion, trendwatching.com’s monthly briefings and annual trend reports can help you with the predicton of your strategy and business development challenges.

* I’ll try to make an interview with Reinier Evers, founder of trendwatching.com about his opinions for 2009′s emerging trends despite the crisis and their  Springspotter Network ‘s business model.

3 weeks ago, i listed 77 Google Services which has become the most popular post on SiteBoat. I understood how people wonder anything about Google. I saw an interesting post on TechCrunch about a presentation on Google prepared by FaberNovel, a French IT consulting firm. This is an interesting and very informative presentation which you can watch below.

This presentation informs you about some questions all the Internet people are curious about. For example:

• How want Google to compete with Facebook?
• Why won’t Google be touched by the crisis?
• How does Google buy traffic?
• How did Google capture the offline advertising market?
• Why isn’t PageRank an efficient obstacle against rival entries on the market?
• Why doesn’t Google monetize all of its services?
• Why does Microsoft fear Google?

Google’s revenues 2008 is predicted about Bn$20 and revenues 2012 is projected Bn$ 35 in the presentation. There is an interesting slide titled “Why is Google stealing our voices?” telling that Google is creating a database of phonemes, recorded during Local Voice Search calls. This database is used to better its speech to text technologies.

In summary, Google’s now and future is very well summarized by FaberNovel in this presentation, this is a well done job.

CrisisWire is a brand new aggregator of information about a crisis or a disaster. CrisisWire is founded by volunteers from RefreshSD, a web community in San Diego, CA; in October, 2008. CrisisWire uses many sources, including Google Maps, Twitter, Flicker, news sites and blogs. Crisis has a speed advantage which main stream media doesn’t have.  In their own words:

CrisisWire depends on citizen journalists as well as traditional media outlets. The information is not curated, so you must evaluate its worth or accuracy for yourself.

Right now it’s the fire season in California and CrisisWire has gathered all the content across the web about Santa Barbara Fire. I think CrisisWire is a content agregator about an innovative – niche subject will be very succesful, but home page needs some improvement.

Google announced a new service, ‘Flu Trends‘. Influenza, commonly known as the flu is a serious infectious  disease caused by the Influenza RNA viruses. Flu spreads around the world and in some years, it kills millions of people. Three influenza pandemics occured in the 20th century and more than 10 million people died.

Health 2.0: Expansive definition “New concept of health care wherein all the constituents (patients, physicians, providers, and payers) focus on health care value (outcomes/price) and use competition at the medical condition level over the full cycle of care as the catalyst for improving the safety, efficiency, and quality of health care” – Last updated on May 25, 2007 (Source: Scott Shreeve, MD – January 24, 2007)

Google uses the data from their popular ‘Google Trends’ service to predict the flu trends. Google Trend analyzes Google web search queries to compute how many searches done for a term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. (Source: Google Trends – About) Last year, a small team of Google engineers began to explore if there is a correlation between Google search trends and real-world happenings. When they met with the Health Gurus’s on Google.org’s Prevent and Predict Team, they decided to focus on outbreaks of flu. The team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season, each year. They compared these aggregated queries against data provided by U.S. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and found a very close relationship between the frequency of the flu-related searc queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms.

The CDC does a great job of surveying real data to track the flu, but traditional flu surveillance systems take more than 1 week to collect, to release and to interpret weekly surveillance data. The first graph is from CDC website and the second graph is from Google Flu Trends and they show us the similarity between Google’s estimated trends and real-time trend.

(Image courtesy of the U.S. CDC)

Image courtesy of Google Flu Trends

Google search queries can be counted very easily and making flu estimates available each day. This system provides an early warning system for outbreaks of influenza. Early detection of a disease is very important to reduce the number of people affected. You can read the Google.org blog post here and ‘How we help track flu trends‘ post on Google official blog.

As i mentioned in the ‘definiton of Health 2.0′ , Google Flu Trends is a new concept for improving efficiency and quality of healthcare. Google Flu Trends is a brand new Health 2.0 application and a pioneer for preventing infectious disease outbreaks and shows us the increasing power of the Internet in our daily lives. Google Flu Trends has offered us an innovative – preventative way instead of treating the disease. Google Health was launched in May, 2008 and we will review Google Health service later.

* I caught flu and  Whilst writing this post, i’m still sick; i haven’t been able to go to work for two days. I’ll get vaccinated and follow Google Flu Trends to protect myself against catching flu

When used in business, the term “Niche” is used to describe fresh, virgin and profitable…

A niche market is a focused targetable segment of a market.  A business which focuses on a niche market  adresses a demand for a product or a service which is not met by any supply. Niche markets don’t exist themselves everytime. In some situations, you must create your niche markets by identifying demands (needs and wishs of your customers) which are not met by your competitors.

Niche Marketing

Niche marketing is the process of finding and serving profitable niche market segments. Niche marketing means less competition but much more effort than traditional marketing. The hardest part of niche marketing is finding customers. The easiest medium for niche marketing is the Internet, because of its capabilitiesfor reaching customers easily.

The basic step of finding a niche market is having an innovative and profitable business idea focusing on market segment with less or no competition. If you prefer to go further on this topic, you can check our “Five Steps of the Successfully Internet Niche Marketing”  article.

A niche market means special customers with specific desires and much more challenge for you to sell your specific products or services. Reaching these customers is so hard, but the most efficient marketing medium to use is the Internet. Niche marketers need to know where to apply the Internet’s power.

A good case: SailBlogs

Sailblogs is a blog hosting service which provides blogging and map tracking solutions for the sailing community. SailBlogs offers a very easy editor interface for blogging. SailBlogs uses Google Earth for their customers to track their sailing adventures.

With the eye of an Internet entrepreneur, blog hosting services market is a crowded market and has become a widely known market. Today, it’s too late to start such a business like Blogger.com. There are so many competitors and this market has become a “red ocean”, one full of sharks, attacking each other for meat. When you sail across oceans; you can’t have much time for programming and maintenance of your weblog.

When we look from the sailors’ window; if you are a sailor, you need a time-efficient way to tell  about your sailing adventures and show your photographs & videos to the whole world. An on-line journal can keep you connected.

The intersection of a blogging enterprise and sailing journalism was a hidden niche market and waiting to be discovered. Niche markets are based upon special problems that need special solutions. The innovative solution for both of the Internet entreprenurs’ and the sailors’ problem is SailBlogs. SailBlogs has created its own blue ocean and a niche market to sail across without any competitor. Basic web interface for blogging is the first solution that SailBlogs offers to the sailors; no programming and no HTML knowledge is needed. The second problem for sailors is connection. SailBlogs offers remote posting, map positioning and uploading via satellite phones and this fetaure makes SailBlogs ideal for sailors to use whenever and whereever they want.

Don’t forget that an innovative business idea is a must for finding a special solution to create a niche market.

Niche marketing is an important topic and we will be releasing more articles soon …

Currently, Internet users need to create individual passwords for many websites they visit. Organizing and securing these password gets harder as we add a new website to our visit list in a week. There are some web services to solve this problem and OpenID is the one of the best ones.

OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on many different websites using a single digital identity. It’s a free but strong and secure service which is a good example of a ‘succesful Web 2.0 application’ . OpenId is still in the distribution phase and becoming more popular, as large companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Sun provide OpenId. There are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly 10.000 + web sites supporting OpenID. OpenID is not owned by anyone and OpenID Foundation assists the open source model of OpenID.

As Brad Fitzpatrick (the father of OpenID) said, “Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.”

Yesterday, Google announced that they move towards single sign-on with OpenID. You’ll be able to use OpenID supported web sites with your Gmail/Google account. OpenID gets stronger after Google joins the OpenID movement, because adding 51 million Gmail users to its community is a big acquisition for OpenID. ZoHo is the first company which lets its users to use their google accounts to login Zoho.com . Google is also working with the open source community to integrate OAuth and OpenID protocols via OAuth-enabled APIs such as Google Data APIs.

I think OpenID system will be the unique authentication way of the Internet; so if you have a website that require user login; OpenID is a must for you to support.

TranslateIN.com is new web application to help you translate a word or a phrase from one of 34 avalaible languages to the remaining 33 of them.  It has a very simple interface for translation and powered by Google Language Ajax API. A mobile version of TranslateIN will be available soon.

While surfing, come upon blogs, websites..etc worth have a look? But you don’t have enough time? There are many tools about saving bookmarks to read later. toread gives you an alternative way, an email-based bookmark service. It looks like a simple and handy way to reach your bookmarks. You receive your “toread” web sites by email. You can save them on your local disk and browse them offline.

It’s an innovative way to bookmark “toread” web sites. We think toread is worth a try.

Howtosayin is a web site which lets you translate your words or sentences into 23 languages. It’s a simple but very useful site. After making some improvements, howtosayin may become a powerful web translator application.

The real power of howtosayin is, using Google AJAX Language API as the translationengine. This case shows me the power of open source, again.

What is the Google AJAX Language API?

With the AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. In addition, you can enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in your web page. For example if you were transliterating to Hindi, this API will allow users to phonetically spell out Hindi words using English and have them appear in the Hindi script.

The language API is designed to be simple and easy to use to translate and detect languages on the fly when offline translations are not available. We plan on adding more exciting capabilities to the AJAX Language API in the future, so stay tuned.’ from Google AJAX Language API page .

Google helps talented developers to use its API’s for free; and if you have programming and design skills or a you have a team with these skills you can develop strong web applications without trying to build a core engine…