For delicious – phew, I’ll continue to use the service in the hopes that this means innovation will come back to delicious. I think Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are solid visionaries who can build and ship product in a meaningful way. I hope they’re going to do something meaningful with Delicious and give it a great second act.

As for Yahoo, all I can do is sigh. I was upset when I first heard of Yahoo’s plans with Delicious but it’s not new. It’s more of the same at Yahoo. More sitting and wasting assets, not only product but the people who came with those products.

I wish Yahoo had empowered Stuart Butterfield, Caterina Fake – founders of flickr – Joshua Schachter (Delicious) Eric Marcoullier (mybloglog), Andy Baio (Upcoming) and the founders of the other great consumer web services they had acquired. Instead of making ex-MSFT, ex-Aol, Ex-Autodesk and even ex-Google executives head of products and innovation and R&D what Yahoo should have done is empowered these visionaries to think across product and across segments for truly revolutionary innovations. I recognise it’s not an easy task, most of these people preferred building start ups, but it can be done, if you put the right structures in place and incentivise correctly.

I truly believe Facebook is kick ass because a number of it’s product executives came from Friendfeed or from VC funds where they were connected to innovation closely. Facebook also has a visionary at the helm. This is something that Amazon, Apple and Google also have. Bezos, Jobs, Page and even Zuckerburg have created things and value true engineering innovation. For Yahoo to compete it will need to find a real visionary, not more managers.

Unfortunately, the reaction by the entrepreneurial community has been quite negative. Lots of negative comments on the website that’s apparently at the centre of the campaign. Issues about links to US companies and the execution of the site miss the point.

The point is that entrepreneurship is seen by the government as important and there is an opportunity to harness support, change policies and build networks to help support and give entrepreneurs a better chance at succeeding.

Which is why the cynicism directed at the campaign and the calls for heads for partnering with a US company really annoyed me. I cheekily tweeted that:

“#startupbritain cynicism shows the difference between US/UK! In the US, the response would be cool, let’s get to work.”

To be fair, I don’t think that would be the exact reaction, I just think the US is better at celebrating success and at not paying much attention to failure. As well Americans seem to treat programs that they don’t believe would work with indifference. When the government fails the start up community in the US there’s a powerful movement to solve it. From VCs meeting with heads of state to blog posts that end up turned into op-ed pieces in powerful media outposts. When an entrepreneur does something for the community in the US it seems like the community either helps him make it better or moves on quickly to making their own company a success.

This may be naïve, but I have seen a lot of mud slinging and not a lot of productive feedback. Don’t get me wrong there are some pockets it the UK that are supporting this and are encouraging the movement and there are some really snarky responses to government initiatives in the US as well, I just think the ratio of support : snark / cynicism is reversed and we’re holding our own community here in the UK back as a result of it.

So put aside the cynicism for a second, if you don’t like #startupBritain just move on. If you have a way to improve it give the feedback to the team, and if you’re supportive of the movement carry on. Building great companies in the UK is difficult, we’re going to need all the help we can get and knocking down

It really strikes me as odd that no one is talking about the iPod Touch and how this is a strong seller and growing amongst younger users. Sure, teens love BBM, I’ve seen this on the train repeatedly (where I conduct most of my user observations with people sending me weird looks repeatedly), and this makes a lot of sense as BBM is “cool” and teens like using something their parents aren’t using (parents using iPhones, teens wanting blackberrys). With roughly 2 iPod Touch units sold for every 3 iPhones this is a pretty big user base.

I’m seeing lots of younger teens and kids using iPod touch’s. From as young as our 18 month old (who can unlock, start an app and watch YouTube) to friends’ 4 year olds, 7 year olds to older kids whose parents have deemed these kids as too young to have a phone, an iPod touch is this generation’s game boy. With one exception – it’s still a communication device. As kids get older their using apps as messaging tools.

With recent investments by both Fred Wilson and Mark Suster in “group messaging platforms “(Kik.com and Gogii – which makes textplus.com respectively) and our own in-house use of whatsapp, not to mention Skype, iCall and other messaging applicationsI can see this trend growing.

RIM’s BBM is nice, I’ve long maintained it’s the one killer app that keeps people on BBs, but as this teenage segment becomes young adults and the next generation of teenagers move on from the iPod touch to phones my guess is they’re going to want to stick with an OS they’re familiar with and groups and contacts that move seamlessly from the iPod touch they’ve been using for the past few years, wonder which phones they’ll choose?

Today I received a twitter follow from someone who wasn’t using their real name, didn’t have a real picture, no about information and no link to more information and had their tweets protected. I felt a beat cheated and proceeded to tweet:

Not a fan of people who don’t use their real names and then protect their tweets.

A couple of Retweets let me know I wasn’t alone, but one person responded wanting to know more, and we went back and forth. I know this person in real life and they have two different accounts, and everyone who knows this person knows that they use this specific twitter handle. It’s similar to a couple of years ago when I used to use Staples quite a bit as a handle on things like Flickr, twitter etc.

Anyway, I thought I should unpack my tweet and frustration a bit. It all comes down to how you use social media.

Although there’s a lot of overlap between how I use facebook, linkedin and twitter in my head they’re quite clear divisions. Facebook is people I’ve met in real life, people who might like to see the latest picture of my daughter, mostly people I’ve shared a drink or two or twenty with at some point in my life, or people who knew me when and wouldn’t mind staying in touch.

Linkedin is mostly used for people I’ve worked with or would like to work with. It’s people that I’ve exchanged professional emails with or met at a conference. I’ll accept requests from friends but won’t add friends unless there’s a likelihood that we’ll be able to help eachother out professionally in some circumstances.

Twitter is the hardest to explain, because it kind of falls between the two. I use twitter to share and distribute to and with people who I either have a connection with or might have some kind of connection with in some way either socially, personally or professionally. I use it to share a bit of my personal life (like what I’m watching and sharing opinions on the Apprentice or the X-factor) but mostly about professional stuff – like information sharing, data, interesting commentary and editorials. On occasion I’ll use it to broadcast what I’m doing or where I’m going, but that to me is a secondary use case.

This is why I get frustrated by people who don’t use their name, have a picture or any information about who they are, protecting their tweets and then following me. If I don’t know you and you’re not giving me any information on what you’re interests are / what kind of stuff you’re likely to be sharing, I can’t make a decision on whether it would be in my best interests to follow you. If you’re using your real name at least I can do a quick search and find out more about you and see the kind of stuff you’re likely to tweet.

Not sure if I’m right or wrong on this, just feel a bit annoyed when I don’t know anything about someone who’s following me and they don’t give me any information to find out. Thoughts?

I’m all in favour of the efforts and the investment that the government is putting in; I’d just like to see more encouragement of private investment and of the banking sector to invest in individuals who have the next big idea. The whole idea that the next Facebook or Google can come out of the UK with this framework is not realistic today. There’s a substantial change that needs to happen in angel investment, banking and culture before a big consumer tech company will come out of the UK. The guardian article with comments from Joe White is the only article I’ve read that points this out well.

A company needs much less capital today to get started. While the government looks at raising funds for investment what they really should be doing is passing on tax relief for investors who are investing in truly early stage companies. As well as changing and encouraging the banking sector to lend to early stage companies with solid teams and markets and help take on some of the risk. The UK government has some of the levers in place with the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Finance Guarantee but they’ve made these schemes so convoluted and so complicated that it’s really difficult for anyone to really take advantage of these levers.

The UK culture towards entrepreneurship is changing, but failure is still seen as a bad thing rather than a badge of having the courage to try something new. The media, with it’s programs like Dragon’s Den, doesn’t help this by making 4 entrepreneurs seem like bumbling idiots compared to every 1 who has their head screwed on right.

That being said, I do believe London is one of the top three places in the world to start a company – with the Valley and New York being the other two – and while this is a great step towards ensuring that London continues to compete globally on the technology front, there’s still some work on the other side of the spectrum that the government needs to do to take a leadership position globally.

I really, really, really hope Yahoo! does not merge with Aol or get’s involved with News corp. The rumour is that Private Equity houses are getting involved and Aol/News Corp is looking at buying Yahoo!. Mergers and acquisitions have not been Aol or Yahoo!’s strong point. They only work when the target is something that’s going to be core and is not being done by the acquirer before the transaction. When Aol acquired Advertising.com or when Yahoo! acquired Right Media, those transactions worked fairly well, because it was about rebranding and incorporating a new technology and it was going to be a core part of the business.

An acquisition makes sense on paper, Yahoo! is priced at a point that would make it attractive. Even if the strategy isn’t clear; the value of its assets alone make it a pretty compelling story. But price is only one factor, what you need is execution. And an acquisition by Aol would handcuff execution at a point where Google, Facebook and other competitors are firing on all cylinders. Just the thought of dealing with the search deals that the different companies have in place is giving me a headache.

I like Carol Bartz style and she was a breath of fresh air in terms of management ethos. But I’m not sure she totally get’s the Internet and has the vision of someone like Schmidt or even Zuckerburg. I’m not sure who the right visionary is but I’m not sure it’s anyone who’s in either Aol or Yahoo! today.

I definitely think Yahoo! would benefit from becoming a private company, I think the lack of having to answer to investors on short term numbers and being able to invest and focus in a longer term strategy would work well for the company. Also having employees move away from being fixated on the stock price and start thinking about how to really disrupt, design or deliver would help the company move a lot quicker. I just don’t believe a merger/acquisition with another internet beast is the right way to make this happen.

What writing a blog post there showed me is the real viral nature of the web, especially the social web. The post talks about how companies should be ambitious and try to disrupt like Google, design like Apple and deliver like Zappos. This wasn’t the first time I’d referenced these companies and these principles as people who regularly read my blog would know. But what followed was really interesting. Before I even sent out a tweet about the article, 3 people put the post out to twitter, and someone came up with a great hashtag, #3DValue, I really like this short term to describe my thinking. And I really love the fact that a search for #3DValue on twitter brings up a whole stream of people who are referencing this principle.

This is what’s great about social media, instead of communication being one way, multiple people can adapt and reference the thinking in a way that benefits everyone.

It’s great to have one more personal example of how many people can spread and idea as well as making it more succinct using social media.

Founders can adapt, by committing to find a mentor, realise their weaknesses and bring in senior management who can plug their gaps and give them really good guidance. Think this has worked a fair bit for Mark Zuckerburg, Mark has a great board, including people like Marc Andreesen, he’s brought in some great leadership (eg. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a legend). It works for Facebook, Mark might be the face and he might be the subject of films, but I would bet that Sheryl and the other senior managers are able to secure the right partnerships and help the company scale effectively.

On the flip side founders can bring in people and then hand off responsibility when it grows beyond their capabilities. Regardless of how the handovers have happened at Twitter, Ev knows that Dick is a better front man for the company as it scales beyond Ev’s capabilities and putting Costolo in place is a great strategy as the company grows on to the next level.

This all goes back to self-awareness. Are you a Jack Dorsey, an ideas guy who can establish a product? An Ev Williams, who can help scale and grow a company? A Dick Costolo who can take a really big company and really grow it into a potential 9-figure exit or even an IPO? Or are you a Mark (or for that matter a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a few other special leaders), who can take the company from idea to real scale at a point where the world is coming into contact with your company everywhere? Knowing if you can and want to adapt as the company grows is really important and ultimately will help dictate the level of success the company will have.

Here’s the thing, all websites either sell something or match up parties. Dating websites sell their audiences but they differ in how wide or deep they want those audiences to be engaged. I think the spectrum goes from a site like plentyoffish.com at the low end, dead easy, low bells and whistles really simple and you get what the tin tells you plenty of fish. On the other end you have a site like okcupid which markets itself as a matchmaker asking deeper questions to help you find your match. I’m not in the market for dating websites (thankfully being married to the greatest wife ever means I don’t have to visit sites like these) but even I was interested in OK Cupid’s blog post on the real stuff white people like. I had come across this post just before my conversation with Josh so it helped me see the common line between dating websites and the rest of the web. The question is; are you a plenty of fish or an Ok Cupid? Or rather are you a for the masses or a for the value site.

Let’s look at social networks, Facebook is a for the masses, everyone’s on it and it’s connections are madness, Linkedin is a value where there’s deeper engagement. Question and answer sites, Yahoo! Answers is a for the masses, Quora is a value rich model. Other social networks like Twitter, and Q&A sites like Mahalo, fall inbetween.

Knowing which end of the spectrum you want to be can help you dictate content and marketing strategy. Questions like should you invest more in SEO or in Buzz and PR can be answered by know what kind of dating site you are.
It’s an interesting concept and I wonder what others think.

1 – Great teams and entrepreneurs, it was so great to see some companies from across Europe (and indeed the world) doing some great things. I personally got to see Editd, Hypezoo, Getagreatboss.com, GIS Cloud, Cognition, Financeacar.co.uk and Garmz and all of them had a spark and all, all of them also had revenue and costumers of some sort. On average the quality of teams was high.

2 – Great mentors, not to toot my own horn, but almost everyone I met yesterday was really impressive. There was a great number of people that I had either met in the last couple of months or had tried to meet since moving back to London. My mentoring team was pretty impressive with Alex Hunter (angel investor and ex-Virgin dude), Lisa Rodwell (Moo VP and ex-Yahoo), Rachel Bremer (Spark PR) and me. Everyone added some value to almost all the groups and I have no reason to believe this wasn’t the case with most of the mentoring groups.

3 – Great flow, the day was balanced with a good mix of networking opportunities with other mentors, workshops and mentoring the teams. This was key for me, as someone who can add some value to the teams (I hope) but is also starting his own company, it was great to get a chance to meet other people and get some mentoring and connections myself.

As much as I enjoyed the day there were three things I would have loved to have seen:

1 – Less mentoring sessions with more time, seeing seven groups in one day was a bit extreme, there were some sessions where we could have given the team a lot more information and feedback and there were some sessions were 45 minutes or 30 minutes might have been enough.

2 – More preparation and feedback as a mentor, would have been great to have more structure around the mentoring sessions. I ‘m not sure if the Seedcamp team did this with the teams, but I would have preferred not to have spent more than half the time going through the business proposition and the company’s performance. Some teams were definitely more prepared than others. There were two occasions where I stopped entrepreneurs and said, “okay, we get it, what do you need, how can we help”. Would have preferred the entrepreneurs to be prepared and have more information about us so they could be more prepared for the mentor session. Think this might go back to point 1.

3 – Some really early stage companies – every company (or at least all the companies I met), had product out and had either investment or revenue. It would have been great to meet some companies that were team, idea, prototype stage so you could be really creative and add some serious value to a potential company. It’s hard to convince a company that’s been going for 2 years, with revenues that they need to pivot, it’s easier to meet teams earlier in their start up lives and say “have you thought about this market”.

Overall, this was one of my best days since moving back to London, the caliber, organization and execution was exceptional and I think Saul, Reshma, Phil and the rest of the Seedcamp team are doing a phenomenal job and are helping the European start up community beyond words. I can’t wait for next year!

p.s. – For more on seedcamp here’s an angel’s view and the techcrunch article