Phone 2.0 and the wisdom of picking an opening act [Dawn Patrol]
I had a meeting today with Michael Cerda, yoga instructor, bass player and CEO and co-founder of VOIP company Jangl. Jangl recently went live with its anonymizing service for Match.com users and at its own site. What Jangl allows you to do is get an anonymous phone number, not your real number in other words, that you and another person or persons can access. When the relationship ends, so does the number. In the dating arena this makes obvious sense, but you can also imagine it extending to something like eBay or Craig's list. Selling a car, call this number. As soon as the sale is made, the number expires. Install a Jangl widget on your blog or MySpace page, and now you have a way to for people to call you and not stalk you.
Cerda's lesson though is when you are a startup pick a big, single, opening act. In Jangle's case that was going after the dating space and in particular Match.com. Jangle has all sorts of other features up its sleeve. It's launching anonymous SMS in three weeks, and you will see a variety of other phone-based features coming soon from Jangl that allow you to personalize every aspect of your phone and extend your online social network to your handest (press one to see my latest Flickr photo, press two to listen to the song at the top of my playlist). "We had about 15 things we could have launched with, but we picked one," Cerda says. "In fact our VCs (Storm Ventures, Labrador Ventures and Cardinal) told us, if you want to get this funded pick one."
It's an important lesson for startups. Picking one thing forced Jangl
to focus. That led to the deal with Match.com, which has since made
all the other dating sites eager to get a meeting with Jangl. Most
importantly it gives Cerda and his team a beachhead from which to
launch the rest of their ideas into the marketplace.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Michael Copeland)
SunPower buys PowerLight [Dawn Patrol]
While working on Silicon Valley’s Solar Power Play for the magazine I spent a fair amount of time poking around both PV panel manufacturer SunPower (SPWR) down in San Jose, and across the SF Bay in Berkeley at PV mounting hardware and integrator PowerLight. PowerLight was clearly one of those companies setting up for an IPO, probably in 2007, given its revenue growth and momentum in the marketplace.
One of its biggest suppliers, SunPower took PowerLight out today for $265 million in cash upfront plus a retention carve-out of $67.5 million vesting over 2 to 4 years. It’s an interesting deal because it signals a consolidation that is likely to accelerate among U.S. based solar companies as they battle much larger Japanese and German competitors eager to tap the U.S. and global market. The energy industry is all about scale, and this gets SunPower a bit more of it. Wall Street sent SunPower's shares up 40 cents, or 1 percent, to $38.54.
The specific play for SunPower and PowerLight is likely a much tighter
focus on products. In the early days, a company like PowerLight had to
offer installation services and project management because there was no
one else to do it. That is not the case today, with services companies
like Borrego Solar, and Akeena Solar for example, trying to get to some
scale on the services/install side. PowerLight gets bought, therefore,
for its mounting hardware technology, something that is very
complementary to SunPower’s module technology. “You are seeing the
market start to bifurcate into its unique elements in the solar energy
industry,†says Mark Culpepper, EVP of SunEdison, which is essentially
a utility selling solar power and has bought gear from both SunPower
and PowerLight. “The people who are focused on service are focused
there, and the people who are focused on products are really beginning
to tune their forks there. This is more evidence.â€
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Michael Copeland)