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Twitter based startups gain 23 million in funding, half that obtained by twitter itself

Contactless payment systems are credit cards, key fobs, smartcards or other devices which use RFID for making secure payments. The embedded chip and antenna enable consumers to wave their card or fob over a reader at the point of sale. Some suppliers claim that transactions can be almost twice as fast as a conventional cash, credit, or debit card purchase. Because no signature is typically required for purchases under US$25, some research indicates that consumers are likely to spend more money due to the ease of small transactions.

With a potential global market value of nearly $1 trillion in payments, this is not an area that cards issuers, acquirers or schemes can afford to ignore. The US has the greatest potential in terms of contactless payments, with low value cash transactions of $297 billion per year at present. The global contactless opportunity is $963 billion per year.
(Source

Contactless payment phones or Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled phones will become increasingly common, and a recent report highlights the following:

• Global mobile subscribers with NFC phones will reach 700m by 2013
• The market is currently dominated by FeliCa-enabled phones on the networks of NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank in Japan, where we estimate about 50m FeliCa-enabled phones have been shipped to date.
• North America, Western Europe and Far East & China will be the leading regions by 2013, with each region having annual shipments in excess of 25% of total NFC phone shipments.
Source

Opportunities lie in mobile software for contactless payment and contactless point of sale readers

Great resources on what it takes to be a good product manager

Good product manager Bad Product Manager

Role of the product manager

Top 12 product management mistakes

About:
Marketcetera Inc provides open source software for automated trading systems. With 10,000 software downloads and more than 20 production deployments, Marketcetera provides maximum flexibility and technology choice to financial services institutions of all sizes. Marketcetera’s platform lets brokers and traders build effective automated trading systems, develop proprietary algorithms, create order management solutions and manage risk faster, easier and at much lower cost than with closed platforms.

Whats hot about this start up?

- Industry’s first Open source Trading Platform. Total Market size is around $ 1 Billion US Dollars.
- Multiple potential revenue streams ( Services, Market Data, Brokerage(commissions per trade).
- Fast time to deploy
- Zero licensing cost to the customer as the software is Open source.

Founders: Co-Founded in 2006, by Stanford Computer Scientists, Graham Miller (CEO) and Toli Kuznets (CTO). Both founders have over 10 years experience managing trading platforms and strategies for wall street hedge funds.

Venture Capital: $4 million from Shasta Ventures

Potential Risks/Pitfalls:

Although the company claims that it actually helps drive down costs for hedge fund trading firms, Given the current market turmoil, it will be interesting to see how this company does.
Also, in addition to the product’s code being heavily open source itself, the code also leverages other open source apis such as QuickFIX. This introduces some element of risk for the company, for 2 reasons, a) It now has a heavy dependency on the quality and performance capabilities of the 3rd party open source libraries. If these apis degrade in quality or performance, Marketcetera can get adversely impacted. b) If the 3rd party APIs /Vendors cease to exist, it will need to react fast or develop its architecture such that its easy to operate in a plug and play model and is not tightly coupled to these providers

I came across this article which lists Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. Gartners top 10 strategic technologies for 2009.

1.      Virtualization

2.      Cloud computing

3.      Servers (beyond blades)

4.      Web oriented architectures

5.      Enterprise mashups

6.      Specialized systems

7.      Social software / networking

8.      Unified communications

9.      Business intelligence

10.  Green IT

In 2008, Gartner released the Tech Hype Cycle Graph below:

The explanation of the hype cycle in the article is as follows: The hype cycle says that interest in a new technology enters a phase of “excited speculation about all the benefits new technology will offer” which eventually reaches a peak of “inflated expectations.” This is followed by a cold, hard “trough of disillusionment.” Eventually some practical business applications emerge – but which business applications, leveraging what technology, is hard to say.

As you can see in the technology hype cycle in 2008, Green IT and Social computing were in the “Peak of inflated expectations”, moving towards “Trough of disillusionment” and Gartner lists them in the bottom of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009.

What does this mean for tech entrepreneurs? Why should we care about the Gartner tech hype cycle?

IMHO, the hype cycle is a good reference, to determine the business viability of your big idea..where on the Gartner hype cycle does your big idea lie? If its not listed on the hype cycle, based on your market research and analysis, where do u think your big idea lies?

Jumping into a business area for which the hype is at its peak, is certainly risky..However, not jumping in then may also mean lost opportunity and risk of not being the first mover..Catch 22..

I presume most entrepreneurs start exploring an opportunity in the “Technology Trigger” phase, when most of the research, prototype development is done and are well positioned to capitalize on the potential opportunity by the time there is a lot of excitement and publicity in the marketplace and media.

I cant help but wonder, what risk mitigation approaches do entrepreneurs need to account for when jumping onto a path breaking solution area?

While reading through my previous post 2009 tech pioneers, you may have noticed how many start ups listed in the top 36 were actually based outside the US.

It made me wonder, will America will continue to be the epicenter for entrepreneurship few years from now?

For decades, America has been on the forefront for entrepreneurship and innovation.The best ideas originated here in America, were provided the right level of support from the government, investors, and the consumers to fuel early stage companies into world class companies.

The examples of such successes are numerous. In the software world, American companies pretty much dominate this space with well recognized brands such as Microsoft, Oracle, Google , eBay to name just a few. However, in the changing world landscape and economic conditions, its quite likely that the lead America has enjoyed will likely to face some competition, not just from other developed economies but from emerging economies as well.

That said, America may continue to be the market place of the world..Americans and Corporate America will still continue to be the early adopters of technology. However, there seems to be a shift in the origin of the products/services offered to the American consumers.

Emerging economies like India and China, have traditionally been known for their outsourcing services. While corporate America is raging about the loss of American jobs to such countries, they have to soon wake up to another reality: Companies in such countries are also working furiously towards building innovative technology solutions that are delivered to a world market over the internet.. With a bright talent pool available, companies in India such as Toufee that provides an online tool for easily developing flash movies for your website are just a start.

Governments in various countries such as China, India, Russia, Israel are working hard to provide the level of support required to these companies. Venture capitalists, including some well known US venture capital firms have set up shop there. These countries have some barriers to overcome, but it may be a matter of time..

The first wave of innovation started by following the US lead on innovation, and improvising it for local markets. Chinas Google equivalent Baidu.com is one such example.

However, The internet has flattened the world, and thereby provided the platform for companies all over the world that are plugged in to serve the world marketplace. Take for example, Israels software start up Zend. The company developed Zend Studio, which is a Integrated development Enviroment (IDE) for building Rich internet applications using Ajax.

Do you know of other successful software startups who are based on innovations developed abroad and marketed worldwide?

I created a new category ‘Tech Trends’ to post some of my findings of my market research. I may also share some business ideas in the tech space, my own as well as those posted by others.

To begin with, heres a great article on Venture Beat about Tech trends for 2009 and beyond Tech Trends

The key technology trends to watch for?

- PC and online gaming (currently 9.5 % of a $9.5 billion market). Can soon start effecting sales of
console games such as WII..
- Surface computing that provides a touch screen interface such as that provided by Hewlett-Packard’s touchsmart pc. I love the idea that i may have a touchscreen to place my order at a restaurant table : -)
- Increased online ad spending ..8.8 percent growth in 2009 and 10 plus percent growth in 2010 ..$25 billion increase or more in a $157 billion market (US only).. Get your share of this big pie..It definetly looks yummy…(Source: Emarketer).

I intend to focus on building enterprise software that will be leveraged by large companies, or on the other end of the spectrum, software that can be leveraged by individual users worldwide..Im still undecided on the potential for each, but heres some trends that CIOs are keeping tabs on:

6 Emerging trends CIOs should watch for

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