28 January 2004

Sales Forecasting

Good point well made by Ed Sim on sales forecasting here at start ups. He's right it is mostly a mixture of art rather than science - but the key to me is the trust element. I hate, really loathe, percentage based sales forecasts because its almost impossible to measure success retrospectively - which is part of their point. We have one company that categorizes their pipeline by what Ed characterizes as meaningful meetings and then tracks the sales efforts as they move up, down or out. It does not mean that you can accurately say what the final revenue number will be at the end of the year - but its a good honesty board.
Machine Translation

Another interesting blog from Tim Oren, this time on Machine Translation. My interest in this area was piqued about 2 years ago when we met about 3 teams based in either Moscow or St. Petersburg who had similar takes on the same problem. Russia has an inherent advantage in this area as a. programmers are smart and b. there are a surfeit of highly qualified linguists. As Tim points out the requirement for "a large stock of training data" makes this a human-resource intense project. Furthermore its not just data inputting but actually requires highly skilled linguists with reasonable computer skills to create the stock of data that is in effect the meta language.

The second reason that this area is so interesting is the marketing approach. MT will have to be at least as good as human translators before value will transfer from the services to software. Consider that much of the $10bn market is in highly specialized subjects which require very accurate translation and it would seem that humans will continue to dominate the market for some time. Yet if the product comes close to acheiving human translation standard once a document is analyzed the result is a reasonably accurate "semantic" analysis; which can be equally used for (say) document management.

So do you swing for the fence and try to grab the EU's tower-of-babel translation contract, or convince Asian eectronic goods manufacturers that their user manuals might even be helpful if translated in to a language that the end user recognised as his / her own, or take an easier route to the first, and less demanding $.

18 January 2004

I have been silent for a while due to a; moving appartments, b; my sister getting married over the holiday season and c; and most importantly because I have been writing a PPM. If ever anything causes a desire no to comment more on anything then this is it.

I did however, manage to read Chesbrough's Open Innovation. Brilliant. Best book of the year and it beats the hell out of Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin. Which is beginning to annoy me and I am only 100 odd pages in to a book that is 450 pages long.

In the meantime look out for a great book coming out on the great Spassky Fisher chess match in Reykyavik by John Eidenow and writer of Wittgenstein's Poker
Overfunding Companies

Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners on overfunding companies. A topic very dear to my heart as I believe that Russian companies have an inherent cost advantage in addition to being better by virtue of being different.

28 January 2004

Sales Forecasting

Good point well made by Ed Sim on sales forecasting here at start ups. He's right it is mostly a mixture of art rather than science - but the key to me is the trust element. I hate, really loathe, percentage based sales forecasts because its almost impossible to measure success retrospectively - which is part of their point. We have one company that categorizes their pipeline by what Ed characterizes as meaningful meetings and then tracks the sales efforts as they move up, down or out. It does not mean that you can accurately say what the final revenue number will be at the end of the year - but its a good honesty board.

Machine Translation

Another interesting blog from Tim Oren, this time on Machine Translation. My interest in this area was piqued about 2 years ago when we met about 3 teams based in either Moscow or St. Petersburg who had similar takes on the same problem. Russia has an inherent advantage in this area as a. programmers are smart and b. there are a surfeit of highly qualified linguists. As Tim points out the requirement for "a large stock of training data" makes this a human-resource intense project. Furthermore its not just data inputting but actually requires highly skilled linguists with reasonable computer skills to create the stock of data that is in effect the meta language.

The second reason that this area is so interesting is the marketing approach. MT will have to be at least as good as human translators before value will transfer from the services to software. Consider that much of the $10bn market is in highly specialized subjects which require very accurate translation and it would seem that humans will continue to dominate the market for some time. Yet if the product comes close to acheiving human translation standard once a document is analyzed the result is a reasonably accurate "semantic" analysis; which can be equally used for (say) document management.

So do you swing for the fence and try to grab the EU's tower-of-babel translation contract, or convince Asian eectronic goods manufacturers that their user manuals might even be helpful if translated in to a language that the end user recognised as his / her own, or take an easier route to the first, and less demanding $.

18 January 2004

I have been silent for a while due to a; moving appartments, b; my sister getting married over the holiday season and c; and most importantly because I have been writing a PPM. If ever anything causes a desire no to comment more on anything then this is it.

I did however, manage to read Chesbrough's Open Innovation. Brilliant. Best book of the year and it beats the hell out of Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin. Which is beginning to annoy me and I am only 100 odd pages in to a book that is 450 pages long.

In the meantime look out for a great book coming out on the great Spassky Fisher chess match in Reykyavik by John Eidenow and writer of Wittgenstein's Poker

Overfunding Companies

Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners on overfunding companies. A topic very dear to my heart as I believe that Russian companies have an inherent cost advantage in addition to being better by virtue of being different.