Five Minutes Ltd.

Well we are quite busy these days. Working on Seedcamp prototype.

I guess that it want be so easy. Lot of good startups will apply.

http://blog.seedcamp.com/2008/08/voting-now-open-for-our-video-pitch.html

One of my favorites services Last.fm started to compensate artists. If this works out and I don’t see why it should not, it would be the greatest thing ever happened in music :). After Punk of course :)

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/lastfm-compensa.html

Imagine that bands can avoid labels completely. On Last.fm they have it all. Promotion, distribution, sales…

When I was a teenager I was listening music mostly form independent labels. We were putting money in envelopes with list of albums I want to buy and guys would send me back packages. And these days you just buy your music from Last.fm directly from artist. Nice :)

Other nice post from Seth Godin on Amazon kindle explains how the costs of music and books can dramatically be lowered this way. Also he predicts great future for Amazon Kindle and I agree with that. I think that Kindle is great device. It is not so hyped as iTunes or iPhone but it is definitely not a geek device with limited market as iPhone.

So conclusion. Books and music cheap and at any place. Isn’t that great. When I remember that I had to wait for two weeks to get Nirvana album on a tape:)

And it is a nice way to make publishers run out of their business :)

1. I really believe that mobile social networking is only social networking that makes sense. I want to socialize on the go not while working.

2. Microsoft will kill Google in next five years. I saw them coming back from dead several times and I see they have big motivation to do that in search too. They definitely have he power. And besides that lately it seems that things at Google are breaking apart.

3. Cloud computing is greatest thing lately. I wish that Microsoft does the same thing as Amazon with Ruby on Rails but ten times better.

4. We still need database in the cloud :)

Broken google image I have pulled in using Zemanta :). Now I’m waiting will it pull out link on zemanta web site. Updating… No. Hm they should hard code link to Zemanta to always show :) One more update …. No. Ok I will paste it manually :) http://www.zemanta.com/

We are selected to present our Early stage project (ShoutEm) at Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. To bad that conference was not at the same time as Euro 2008 finals :)

Mobile 2.0 is great conference around web and mobile technologies. People from Nokia, Orange, Vodafone are comming and will have really interesting panels. We already had arranged few meetings with investors. Also we will have an opportunity to present our idea in front of top investors in this area of busines day before conference.

Among the VC firms attending there will be: Telefónica, Atlas Ventures, SYDES and more.

Techcrunch party is also on schedule. Besides that we are invited to dinner with investors, startups etc… We are really looking forward to meet all those people at Mobile 2.0. And some paella in Barca :)

Saludos!

So Five minutes Ltd is currently searching for investor :)

But I wanted to write little bit more about how that happened. First of all it took me a while to realize that it is actually possible to ask for money from someone. It was not in my nature to ask for money anybody. I guess I was raised that way, which could be good. But in another, business sense that just does not work. I was never told that is ok to ask for money if you have a smart idea and you can make profit for your self and investor. If you can make you both happy that is cool isn’t it.

Different example are young entrepreneurs in USA. I was a couple of times in USA and I saw that for example they don’t even think about starting a business without at least some funding. And today those amounts are usually 1 or 2$ mil. Quite common funding for people who actually have no reference no experience etc… Wierd, but it seems to work :)

But here, things are little bit different. Investors want to see that you already have some successful business. I don’t mean successful in a sense of popular and money burning but more like profitable :). Which actually makes more sense to me too.

So. Now after we realized that, we started to look for investment for our new project. We wrote business plan, make few presentations, worked on our pitch and started to make more and more contacts.
Guys like Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen helped a lot. Huge :)

I was actually astonished by the size of that whole investors, VCs, business angels scene. How many of them are out there, how much money they have and how hard for the is to find good projects. But the problem is that guys like us asking for money is even much more there :)

We started locally. On webstart. Berislav , Ivan and their crew did a great job and brought really, really cool, real life investors to Zagreb.
We are currently in talks with three investors from that conference and all three of them are interested in some ways in our company.

After that we were on presentation at Business angels of Slovenia. We met one really interesting/interested guy there. His name is Zvone Jagodič and he is founder of najdi.si which 75% he sold to Slovenian Telekom for quite nice sum of money. Now he is looking for partners :)

We also talked to MCI VC fund and Poteza fund. But they are looking in more grown businesses than ours.

Business angels of Croatia are just founded and I expect that it will take a while before they actually invest into something. Of course we talked to them. But no success so far :)

That’s all for now.
We are looking forward to one European conference on which we were selected from big number of startups to present our idea. We cannot publish any details yet.
So just stay tuned and you will found out which one.

Also I plan to write here about my theory how Microsoft will kill Google in next 5-10 years so if you want to argue with me please come back :)