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Venrock: Shaping the Future, 40 Years of Innovation

Here at Venrock, we are proud to celebrate our 40th Anniversary and we have commemorated our history with the book, Shaping the Future, 40 Years of Innovation. The book is displayed through a widget from our portfolio company, SlideShare, of course! Click on the button on the bottom right hand corner of the SlideShare widget to see the book in full-screen mode.  

Venrock: Shaping the Future, 40 Years of Innovation

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On Investor Panel at Navigation & Location 2008 in San Jose

Photo by Jeff Epp

Update:  Thanks to all of you who came to our digital car & mobile reception. Here are the photos:

Venrock Reception at Navigation & Location, December 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: digitalcar telematics)

I'll be at Telematics Update's Navigation & Location 2008 conference in San Jose on December 2nd.  Venrock is hosting a digital car/LBS reception that evening at a nearby location.  I will also be speaking at the investor panel at 9:55am. The panel is being moderated by Peter Friedland of Seasons Capital and the panelists also include Shawn Carolan, Jeff Crowe, Jodi Sherman Jahic and David Rolf. 

With a focus on businesses in the LBS space, the panel will address the following questions:

• Can turn-by-turn navigation vendors support a shift from subscription to advertising?
• Can emerging social mapping players gain traction or is this just a natural extension for entrenched players like Facebook and MySpace?
• Does the iPhone App Store and gradual opening of carrier location APIs move LBS application ecosystem away from carriers?
• Google and Nokia – friendly acquirers or formidable competitors that can subsidise "free" business models?
• Are emerging LBS players more likely to become smaller tuck-in acquisition targets, or will some achieve enough scale for initial public offerings?

The last year has seen quite a dramatic shift in the LBS space, with location data becoming much more easier to access.  The iPhone and Android G1 launches have seen impressive location-based platforms become available on a widespread basis in the US.  Google, Nokia, Apple, Garmin and Microsoft seem to be emerging as the leading consumer brands in this space.  I'm interested in how this open LBS eco-system seeps into the feature-phone mass-market - iPhone and Android-based phones will, in my opinion, not gain majority market share and so how will operators address this LBS envy from everybody else?

I look forward to seeing you at the conference and reception.

At SEMA and AAPEX next week

I will be at the SEMA automotive specialty products conference and AAPEX next week in Las Vegas - I kind of view this as the CES of the automotive market.  For those of you who haven't instantly fallen asleep at the thought of going to an automotive products conference, read on :-)

At the show, I'll be curious to understand the vibe around automotive technologies, given the massive dislocation that is imminent with the Big 3 US auto manufacturers.  What are the Tier 1 & Tier 2 suppliers doing in response to imminent consolidation/bankruptcy?  What technologies will continue to get adopted through the automotive channel (including factory-installed by auto OEMs, dealer-installed, direct-to-consumer/DIY, etc.)? Do the non-US auto OEMs see the next 18 months as a market share grab opportunity with new technologies?  And, of course, what's hot and what's not for the coming year ? The categories I will focus on include Mobile Electronics, Tools & Equipment, and OEMs, with a special eye out for telematics, third-party device integration, open systems and green driving. 

Let me know if you're going to be there and would like to meet to discuss new products and new ventures or collaborations with any of our digital car and automotive technology companies.

Verticalized mobile search wins over horizontal mobile search

I'll be moderating a Mobile Search panel for the Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA) tonight - Tuesday October 21 - seven years after I spoke there last on "mobile application development platforms."   Our esteemed panelists include:

• Lee Ott, Director, oneSearch, Yahoo!
• Josh Siegel, Product Manager, Local Mobile, Google
• Greg Carpenter, Founder & CEO, Boopsie
  
• Mark Grandcolas, Director of Business Development, Computing Science Laboratory (CSL), PARC

I personally have found my mobile search behavior changing over the last couple of years - I was originally a fiend on Google mobile search, even using it at dinner tables to settle debates.  Now, I finding myself using very verticalized mobile search utilities - I think mobile search is about these specific use-cases as opposed to a general horizontal search approach.  Examples of mobile search apps I use include: VuClip's mobile video search, Wikipanion mobile search, Yelp's local search, Dash Navigation's local navigation search, Greystripe's Gamejump games search, Jingle's Free411 service, and LinkedIn's people search.

The market has evolved as well - in 2005/2006, several independent mobile search companies got funded.  Since then, I think Google and Yahoo! have cemented their lead in the horizontal mobile search space and Nokia has appeared as a strong contender, especially outside the US with its D2C strategy.   Google and Yahoo! have been duking it out across the world for mobile operator on-deck deals - witness Yahoo's Telefonica deal and Google's NTT DoCoMo deal.  I don't know the exact numbers but I believe live/automated paid directory assistance (which is also mobile search in a broader sense) offered by the mobile operators has also suffered at the hands of mobile local search, mobile horizontal search and free directory assistance - I have heard second-hand rumors that free directory assistance might have taken 5-7% of share away from paid directory assistance.

Many of the mobile search companies have added a greater emphasis on mobile advertising; mobile search has broadened out to include local search (especially with the popularity of GPS-enabled mobile devices), controlled search (searching for media/content in your phone's file system), and voice search; and verticalized mobile search has gained prominence.  

So will the future bring the dominance of horizontal mobile search or will verticalized search continue to hold its own? How will mobile search evolve different in carrier-controlled markets (e.g. US) versus more open markets? What modes of search will dominate (browser, client, SMS, voice, in-car)? What effect will the iPhone/Android have on mobile search?  Does the online model of ads alongside mobile search results work in a mobile setting? We'll talk more about this at the panel.

Speaking at Where 2.0 - "What's Hot and What's Not on the Geoweb"

I'll be at Where 2.0 this week, speaking at 1:45pm on Wednesday about "What's Hot and What's Not on the Geoweb" from a VC perspective - I will also cover GeoCar, GeoVoice and GeoMobile. 

As an investor, I think Where 2.0 has emerged as an interesting forum because it brings together talented geoweb developers and mind bending enabling technology companies.  What attracts me to the Geoweb is not only the huge momentum toward geo-enabling almost every web service but also the potential disruption that this could cause to a number of existing industries, such as telecom (directory assistance), publishing (local guides, maps, etc.), radio (advertising, content), travel, retail, automotive etc in the US and other geographies.

We are investors in two companies in this space Inrix and Where.com. as well as a number of other companies in the mobile and media spaces that could be of great value to developers for distribution, content and enabling technology. 

Join me for my talk and let me know what you think.

Update: I'm adding here the slides from my presentation today.  I will give more detailed voiceover during my talk.

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