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The registration for the fabulous Le Web 3 ’07 fourth edition and preliminary program taking place in Paris on Dec 11-12 has opened.
If you are only going to attend one web related event in Europe this year – this is the one!

Last year when I was visiting Hong Kong and met with the Simon Lee & the guys at Bullpoo, they complained that there where not enough web entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. And if there were, they were not aware of each other. I then suggested that the meet up with a few people I had been in contact with and start meeting informally for drinks once a month. Guess what? Today Simon tells me over Skype that the initiative I started have just resulted in the fourth Hong Kong Web Start up Meet up, and they were almost 200! Amazing!

EditGrid hosted the last meetup, Yahoo HK have started to show-up and  Catharina Maracke from Creative Commons was there as well. I am really excited about the fact that it was started on my initiative and in one year has grown to such an extent. There is nothing more gratifying than being able to help and connect people with each other.

And of course, what event/group can be taken seriously if they don’t have their own Facebook group? Join HK Web 2.0 on Facebook here.

I for sure will come by next time I have an opportunity to join the meetup. Good luck – and thanks Simon for sharing the story.

I know I haven’t been blogging for the last 3 weeks, sorry about that for all you people who have been up sleepless wondering what is going on. There is a very good reason for it:

• We have a new baby on the way
• I am taking some time-out before my next new very exciting venture (stay tuned)
• Family time – it’s summer!
• I have found Twitter and Facebook as more suitable platforms for updates and all the miscellaneous stuff.

Stay tuned for more stuff on Outsourcing my life, RunCasting and Storyboarding!

Yesterday Loic and I took our RunCast (or should I call it a FogCast?) to a new level: The Golden Gate RunCast featuring guests: Bill Tai, General Partner with Charles River Ventures (and on the Maxthon board) and Konstantin Othmer,CEO and founder of Coremobility. It was a great run on a bridge over troubled water and can bee seen as bridging the gab between Europe and the US

Technorati Tags: billtai, goldengate, loiclemeur, coremobility, crv, storyboards

Since the feedback on my idea of using storyboards to develop business plans have been very positive, I decided to create a Facebook group dedicated to the topic. Enter Storyboarders. Drop your word-based business plans & burn those power points. Enter the storyboards! We are the storyboarders, creating conversations – not just presentations!  Feel free to join in & let’s crowdsource it to the next level. Who knows, perhaps this group will give birth to a new business plan format better suited for humans including VCs?

Technorati Tags: businessplans, creativeprocess, crowdsourcing, Facebook, storyboards, tools

Since I have been sitting in on quite a few start-up pitches as well as continuously being pitched myself by all kind of ventures, I was thinking if it is not on time to change the current format for business plans. Let’s face it most VC’s don’t even read them, not even the executive summary for that matter. Power point is more and more taking over although we are all sick and tired of them too – especially if they have more than five slides.

Since most businesses are like a developing story – wouldn’t it be easier to use the storyboard as an example of visualizing you business plan? We all love stories, wether they are fiction or not , on TV or not, true or false. As a matter of fact, most good businesses have a good story to tell. Why not try to tell that story as you see it develop over time on a storyboard?

Using the storyboard as a format for describing a business forces you to reduce the crucial steps into single frames and let go of those long never ending paragraphs that nobody reads anyway. I personally use a lot of visual tools in my day to day businesses. My favorite so far is Mind Mapping wether on paper or as for the past four years, a software called MindManager. As a matter of fact, I went through all my University studies using mind maps, which some of them I still have left.

I think that story-boarding is very close to mind mapping, but helps you perhaps better to tell or develop a story. Going forward, I will start using storyboards for some ideas I am developing in parallel with mind mapping.

What then are my favorite tools? Well, except for paper and pen:

• MindManager
• Pages – comes with Mac’s iLife (use the creative templates )
• MacJournal – not a visualization tool, but fantastic for note taking – especially the full-screen author with enable me to write with green letters against a totally black  background – putting all the distractions behind.

Finally there is Montage, which is a very interesting screenwriting software aimed at pro’s – but an interesting option if you really would like to tell your story in a screenwriting format. What are your favorite tools?

Technorati Tags: businessplans, macjournal, mindjet, mindmapping, montage, startups, storyboard, storytelling, vc

Ever since I announced that I am stepping down from my active involvement in Maxthon, the stream of proposals and offers just keep coming. Although I did expect some positive reactions I never anticipated the amount of positive reactions. I now really need to carefully think about what my next move should be and what kind of venture/s I would like to get involved in.

Since I know that my blog readers are extremely intelligent, wise and really wise people, I have decided to crowdsource for some inspiration. Currently a number of options are open:

• Join the VC world
• Top position in a very well known public company
• Join a start-up
• Combine a number of ventures under my Mashup Media company
• Start something completely new
• Just take a very long vacation and think about it

What do you think?

For those of you located in the Bay area, I will be over again July 24 – Aug 1st and as always I love to meet up with fellow entrepreneurs and share experiences,  so if you want to meet up, please leave a comment or contact me directly on you know what…;)

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, Maxthon, netaneljacobsson, crowdsourcing, VC, venturecapital

Loic’s and my first RunCast together finishing of with a PoolCast filmed at a secret location in north Spain.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, netaneljacobsson

Here’s two video’s from the Virtual Goods Summit in Stanford last month. The first: Virtual Items – mainstream or not? Featuring: Jia Shen, James Hong, Robert Scoble, J.T. Stephens and John Vars.

The second video: “Making Virtual Economies Work” focused on what it takes to build, launch, and maintain a successful virtual economy. Featuring: Mark, Joshua, Brock, Raph, and John.

Technorati Tags: vgsummit, vgsummit2007

Dear friends,

I have decided to step down as Senior Vice President & Partner and reduce my active involvement in Maxthon in order to pursue new exciting challenges.

Maxthon has been my main client & more than full time partner for over two years now and gone from 21 million to almost 100 million downloads during this period.

Now that the big strategic deal with Google done, the company is established as a respected browser alternative, I feel that the right time has come for me to move on and get involved in new and exciting ventures.

As a share holder I will continue to support and follow Maxthon’s continued success however, my day to day involvement in the company will stop. For high-level deals you can still reach out to me but for the rest please turn to: business (at) maxthon.

To wrap up, I want to thank you all for these two great years and wish the Maxthon team all the best.

As for future ventures & adventures, stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Browsers, China, Google, Mashupmedia, Maxthon, netaneljacobsson, Software