Hello, Matt here. Since two people have already congratulated me on my move to Madrid, I thought I should mention explicitly that Cedric wrote the last post, not me. You can tell us apart because nothing ever strokes me when I enter a room. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I’m still in Prague, but a move may be in my future as well. Stay tuned.
Have you heard of MobuzzTV? If not, you are missing something big. If yes, well then you already know MobuzzTV is an award-winning online TV network. A kind of CNN 2.0. Every day, MobuzzTV produces and broadcasts 5 different shows in 3 languages for the web and any video-enabled mobile device out there (phone, iPod, PSP, etc).
As it happens, MobuzzTV is based in Madrid and its founder, Anil de Mello, recently invited me to visit his headquarter and offered me a job. I am now happy to officially announce I have moved from Prague to Madrid to become MobuzzTV’s new Chief Operations Officer.
For the past 12 years, I have been running Internet Start-Ups in Paris, London and Prague so I thought Madrid was not a bad location for my next career move. More seriously, I wanted to share in this blog post the top reasons why I have decided to join MobuzzTV.
1/ The team.
You know a company is healthy just by looking at the moral of its team. The first thing that stroke me when I entered their offices was the overall feeling of happiness. It was one of these “if you are having so much fun at work, you must be doing well” moment. I guess the fact they have cute and energetic female blond presenters walking around is good for the moral of the opposite sex. Recently we have been joined by GabeMac who, bless him, miserably fails in the blond female department.
2/ The space
Online videos is a fast growing space and with the global rollout of broadband and super broadband, the web needs more quality content (Would you like more Mentos with your Diet Coke?). This is how MobuzzTV is positioned: Professional Content. Each program is hosted by a talented presenter and targets a different audience. We shoot and edit our own programs in our TV studio in Madrid before it becomes available on the web, in iTunes and on your mobile video device.
3/ The Founder
I first met Anil de Mello 2 years ago at the Monaco Media Forum and we immediately realized we were on the same wave length. Like me, Anil is a serial entrepreneur and has been carrying MobuzzTV on his shoulders for the last 3 years. We complement each other very well (he’s chaotic and I’m maniac) so I’m very excited to help him build on his vision for the company. Amongst MobuzzTV shareholders we have Martin Varsavsky another succesfull serial entrepreneur and Enrique Dans, a professor in one of the top business school in the world and one of the leading Spanish blogger.
4/ The Company’s success so far
Like most internet start-ups, MobuzzTV was started in Anil’s spare bedroom. In 3 years, MobuzzTV shows have been viewed 500 million times. Currently, shows are viewed more than 6.5 million times per month. Recently, MobuzzTV has attracted top-tier brands (Levi’s, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Honda, Adidas, Disney amongst others) as sponsors. In other words, we are talking here about a growing award winning start-up with existing revenues (how peculiar I know!).
5/ The potential
MobuzzTV has great potential both in term of audience and revenue growth. We are already planning to launch a few new shows before the end of the year and we are lining up a few renowned partners to work with us. In fact we have some really cool news coming which we will announce in the next few weeks.
If you are thinking about raising capital for the first time, The Funded has some excellent resources.
At work I listen to music almost constantly, for reasons I’m sure anyone who shares an office with a Frenchman will intuitively grasp. And I’ve been annoyed by every approach I’ve tried to plugging in my headphones. For ages I used a long extension cord, which was constantly falling off my desk and dragging my head with it. Since I got my Mac Book Pro I’ve been plugging my iPod headphones into it, but the cord is so short that my head movement is severely restricted.
So I decided to get some wireless headphones. Cursory research revealed that there isn’t any way to use normal stereo bluetooth headphones with a Mac and get reasonable sound quality (without using a separate bluetooth dongle, which is one more fiddly little gadget to lose or forget while I’m traveling). This requires a standard called A2DP that (amazingly) is not supported in Mac OS X Tiger. (I guess it will be in Leopard.) Luckily I discovered a program called a2dpcast by Tim Hewett which lets you stream via A2DP. I’m using the brand new version which creates a new audio output source called Stereo Bluetooth Headset right in the audio preferences (scroll to the end of the comments in the provided link for installation info). It’s working flawlessly for me so far.
Thanks, Tim!
A couple of years ago Cedric and I attended a conference in Zaragoza and took advantage of the trip to spend a weekend in Barcelona. While shopping at El Corte Ingles we stumbled upon a department with tons of cool leather bags in all shapes and sizes. I picked up a small brown leather pouch with a shoulder strap, just big enough for a large paperback (or, I suppose, a small handgun). Cedric got a tiny mini version of the same. I wore my bag religiously over the summer and found it incredibly convenient. I especially liked the fact that I didn’t look like a circus clown with my pockets bulging with wallet, phone, keys and all manner of gadgetry.
Nonetheless, I took a lot of crap from my friends for carrying a “purse”, despite my protestations that “it’s not a purse, it’s European.” A friend’s wife went on and on about my “buzer taška” (literally “fag bag”). In any case, the bag was kind of small and somewhat the worse for wear a year later, and I went to the megamall in Hyannis, Massachusetts while on this summer’s vacation and picked up a bigger, blacker and apparently more masculine version. I still carry it everywhere I go, so I was tickled pink when Cedric sent me a link to this excellent Lifehacker article. Seems I’m not the only red-blooded male who carries a bag everywhere he goes.
Unfortunately I missed the opportunity to send my bag’s contents into Lifehacker, and they’re probably not geeky enough to make the cut anyway. But for what it’s worth:
1. iPod shuffle packed with technology, golf and NPR podcasts (who has time for music?)
2. Headphones
3. Umbrella I put in my bag this morning because it was raining
4. Wallet
5. This week’s Economist
6. 2Gb USB stick
7. Faceplate for my car stereo
8. 2 koruny (about 10 cents) that somehow ended up in the bottom of my bag and which I will gleefully discover some day when I need exactly 2 more koruny to avoid having to break a 5000 koruna note just to buy a stick of gum
9. Car key
10. Meal tickets (yuppie food stamps)
11. Passport
12. Office keys
13. AAA batteries
14. House keys
15. Another car key (for locking gearshift when parked in “high risk areas”)
16. Antique Nokia 6230i to be replaced with my new E90 if Nokia will ever friggin’ sell it to me
17. Car registration
18. Cute little visa booklet that isn’t needed for travel and that I last used when I bought my car and who knows when before that
19. Lint-free cloth for cleaning my glasses
Not shown: gum (forgot it at home), laptop (too huge although the bag has a great padded pouch for when I become a real manager and get a 15″ or smaller), business cards (in my laptop bag but in any case I never seem to have them when I need them.
I’m in the process of deWindowsification, with a MacBook Pro notebook waiting in the wings to take the place of my tired old Acer. I already have a Mac Pro at home. As part of the switch, I’m looking into changing email clients. Right now I use Thunderbird on my notebook but have a few issues with it:
- I have a several filters and I get an annoying error message fairly frequently when downloading mails. This is particularly irksome when there are a lot of mails to download, since there’s no way I could find to stop the download and regenerate the index, so I have to sit there clicking OK in the dialog box over and over again instead of doing something fun and interesting like watching paint dry.
- I can’t access my email unless I have my notebook with me. I guess this will be less of an issue once I get my Nokia E90.
- Sometimes when I’m traveling the hotel network won’t let me connect to our SMTP server so I can’t send mail.
- No full-text search.
- No fancy features like Gmail’s stars and threads.
I was going to migrate to Gmail, and I found a tool to upload my old mails. But it’s really buggy (it keeps freezing during upload) and the timestamps of all the mails get replaced by the time they are received by Gmail. I uploaded a few thousand mails, which took several days, then got fed up. Other weaknesses of Gmail are the lack of offline capabilities and the annoyingly pointless advertisements plastered all over it.
What I want is to be able to access my mail on both my Macs and my future smartphone. I guess the latter moderates the need for webmail but some sort of web access would still be nice. Offline access on the laptop is definitely a big plus. The kicker is that I’ve been playing with Gmail and the full-text search is really killer. I don’t think I can live without this.
So I’m at a bit of a loss. I still think Gmail+POP would be the best solution if I can find some way to import my old mails. Or do I try to fix my Thunderbird issues (I’m sending this to Planet Mozilla in case this is of interest to the Thunderbird folks)? I guess I can do full text with Thunderbird using Google Desktop, although I didn’t get this to work last time I tried it (admittedly I didn’t try very hard). Or Apple’s Mail application? Would I be able to synchronize between my two Macs? Do I need IMAP? How are other people handling this?
A couple of months ago I checked with Nokia here in Prague to find out when I could get an E90, which was scheduled for availability at the end of June. They told me it was delayed and wouldn’t be in stock until early July. I eagerly ordered one the first week of July and was told that I would receive it by the end of the week. Two weeks later, I was told to wait another week. Today our assistant called, and apparently I won’t be getting it until the end of August, and even that they can’t guarantee. I can’t complain too much since Nokia is, after all, rather new to this business of manufacturing consumer devices.
Meanwhile, I had a chance last week while in the States to play with the iPhone a bit and let me be the last blogger on earth to say that yes, it lives up to the hype. My old Nokia 6230i is still chugging along just fine, so at this point I’m thinking about giving the E90 a miss, holding out for a couple more months and making the Apple takeover of my digital lifestyle complete.
Just in case people are wondering, Cedric and I were traveling last week, and by coincidence we’re both on vacation this week. So if things seem awfully quiet here, that’s why. Everyone will be in the office next week, so things will be back to normal.
“Time-travelling is so last year”
(back to work now)
I was traveling back from London yesterday, and since my laptop battery is pretty much toast (time to get a new one), I was delighted to see that they now have special laptop stations with power outlets in Terminal 1. Unfortunately, when I went to plug in my computer, I discovered that the socket was inset slightly, and that my plug adapter (obviously I have a European plug) wouldn’t fit. Of course, this is only a minor consideration because I doubt that many people in Heathrow are foreigners. It’s only an airport, after all. Also, this only presents a problem for people from countries whose plugs are different from British ones. So if you’re from Malta or Oman, you’re good.
1. The initial codename for AllPeers was Spiderman,
2. The first version was a Windows-only photo-only sharing client,
3. Before we moved to a new office, our CEO (that’s me) used to have his desk (that’s mine) in the kitchen because we were running out of office space,
4. Every morning the product team stands up in a room and discuss today’s plan and issues faced the day before,
5. 3 people in the company moved countries to work with us.
I recognize a picture of Kepler and suddenly I’m a “mid-rank nerd”? Personally I prefer “nerd lieutenant”, thank you very much.
Since Mark was comparing the merits of Europe vs. U.S. for startups, I thought this anecdote might be worth mentioning. Last week I was in the States at my parents’ place in a smallish, extremely rural Connecticut town. (That’s right, despite my finely honed image as a sophisticated urbanite, I’m actually a nature boy.) One of the few exciting things to do in Connecticut is buy clothes, so I headed over to the outlet mall about half an hour away to bargain hunt. After buying an entirely new wardrobe for about $20 (I exaggerate slightly but believe me, outlet malls are where it’s at) I returned home with my purchases.
The next morning, like any good metrosexual I was quivering with excitement to try on my new duds. I slipped on my Brook Brothers linen pants and stepped back to admire myself in the mirror. Instead, my eyes fixed on a small plastic device on the left leg.
“Drat,” I thought. They had forgotten to remove the little anti-theft sensor doo-hickey. My first thought was to wonder how I got out of the store without setting an alarm, but all became clear when I examined the device in question to see how easily I could get it off with the entire firepower of a suburban family’s toolshed at my disposal. Turns out it wasn’t a sensor, but rather an “InkMate” that threatens to spray ink all over the place if you try to remove it. This cooled my inclination to try the do-it-yourself route, and since I was without vehicle and scheduled to leave for the airport in a few hours, I was in a bit of a pickle.
Hot under the collar (and more than a little irritable since I’ve been taking my perennial efforts to quit smoking more seriously over the past couple of weeks), I called up Brook Brothers, ready to read them the riot act. The shop attendant who answered the phone listened to my complaint and passed me to the store manager. Without missing a beat, she took my address and (I kid you not) sent someone out on the hour-long round trip to my parents’ to rid me of my inky nemesis.
Further proof that in the United States, the customer really is king. I can’t for the life of me imagine this happening in any European country. Until snotty Frenchmen and apathetic Czechs cotton on to the importance of not pissing people off, the U.S. will retain its formidable advantage in customer-facing service industries.
<plasticmillion> smontagu: very apt… impressive
<plasticmillion> smontagu: I have to start quoting Tacitus in Latin, makes one seem very erudite 
<smontagu> one of the benefits of a British public school education, one learns how to sound erudite
<plasticmillion> heh, I am a product of American public school education
<plasticmillion> one learns how to make spitballs
In case anyone needed more proof that you should never preannounce anything, we’ve taken a bit longer than expected to prepare this week’s “big news”. It’ll happen early next week.
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