|  |  |  | | | | | GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  While some of Europe's shooting stars have come and gone over the years, not all have either burned brightly or fizzled out. An important part of the development of the continent's startup scene recently has been the emergence of a different sort of success: persistent, independent and innovative businesses that have stuck around when others chose to fold or flip.
Often living for years with a relatively small amount of investment, this generation of companies is characterized by having endured setbacks, switches and significant changes in the landscape. It's a situation that, in many cases, has helped foster a real sense of community and a survivor's attitude. In the third part of GigaOM's Euro 20 roundup, we'll look at five startups we’ve dubbed Almost Famous. They’ve weathered the storm, come out the other side, and have solid products to offer. Criteo Founded: Paris, 2005
Investors: Elaia Partners, IDInvest, Index Ventures, Bessemer Ventures
Business: Online ad re-targeting Europe’s advertising industry is rich and creative, with a long tradition of building clever and innovative startups. But of all the names that are bandied around the continent, perhaps France’s Criteo is the one to keep notice of over the next year.  It focuses on “re-targeting” — that is, catching users who have visited a website but failed to complete a purchase, and then showing them ads on other sites in order to tempt them back.
It’s proven highly successful, with annual revenues set to pass $200 million soon, but the real question is what happens next. The company has raised money every two years since its inception, suggesting that another round could be on the horizon — but with such good numbers, perhaps an acquisition or flotation should be the next logical step. Mind Candy Founded: London, 2003
Investors: Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Spark Partners
Business: Online games  Early efforts from London game developer Mind Candy were critically acclaimed but not commercially successful: a formula that led founder Michael Acton Smith to change direction in 2007 by introducing a new game, Moshi Monsters. A virtual world aimed at tweenagers, the title has become a significant multimedia brand and allowed the business to reposition itself in the social gaming space.
On the back of recent growth, the company — led by serial entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith — has seen its value rise dramatically in the past year. That led to investor Spark recently selling half its stake. Is this just the beginning for Mind Candy’s journey to Super Star? Moo Founded: London, 2006
Investors: Atlas Venture, The Accelerator Group, Index Ventures
Business: Customizable business cards  When it began five years ago, Moo took one of the London's newest industries — the web — and married it to one of its oldest: printing. It harnessed new digital printing techniques and hooked into photo-sharing services such as Flickr and Picasa, to allow people to customize and print business cards, postcards, greeting cards and more. With a strong following among early adopters and a charming, human approach, it offered something other print-on-demand services struggled with.
A move to the next level may feel overdue. The company's long-term plans have no doubt been hampered by the increasingly gloomy retail climate in Britain. But the business seems to be carrying on without too many hitches. It's important, however, to see Moo not only as an interesting entity in its own right, but also as a crucial player in building up the vibrant startup scene in Britain. Shazam Founded: London, 1999
Investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, DN Capital
Business: Music discovery  The oldest startup on our list by several years, Shazam has always been built on great technology. Its first product, launched in 2002, allowed users to identify music they were listening to simply by waving their mobile at the sound. With an audio fingerprinting system that feels like magic, the team has expanded its business to apps and partnerships, with customers like AT&T, Vodafone, NBC and Fox.
But what looked like an increasingly maturing business two years ago, suddenly took on fresh verve with an injection of capital from Kleiner Perkins and a change in management. That switch escalated the company’s plans and now, with an expanding scope and huge ambitions, the business is looking at the television advertising market. Viadeo Founded: Paris, 2004
Investors: AGF Private Equity, Ventech
Business: Business networking  It's fair to say Europe has developed a reputation for clone services — most notably with the Samwer brothers, a duo who have made their careers building and selling German-language versions of sites like Facebook and Groupon. It's no surprise, then, that French professional networking site Viadeo, is sometimes spoken of in disparaging tones; after all, it started just a few months after its biggest rival, LinkedIn.
It might not have developed as much as its transatlantic cousin, but it's no slouch either. It has been consistently profitable since 2009, and having rolled up a number of smaller companies, it now has 35 million users. Next up? It's plotting a course to become the network of choice in rapidly growing markets such as China. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  In the grand scheme of energy technologies, the key component that makes up a fuel cell — which is like a chemical battery that produces electricity — is relatively short lived. This achilles heel is one of the main reasons that building, installing and selling fuel cells can be so expensive, and almost none of the fuel cell makers are profitable yet.
Of course, there are different types of fuel cells, but in general, the stacks that make up a fuel cell, and create the reaction that produces electricity, often times last only between about two to five years. This is common for different types of fuel cells like solid oxide fuel cells (Bloom Energy makes this type) or proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, like what ClearEdge Power builds. A fuel cell’s stacks fill a chamber called the hot box, and it’s this chamber that gets swapped out of these fuel cells every few years. The stack contains a catalyst, often times platinum, which when combined with the fuel source (natural gas or hydrogen) and oxygen create electricity. Break Down  Over time as the fuel and oxygen are constantly being pumped in and run over the catalyst in the stacks the chemicals start to degrade and the system starts to wear down.
Fuel cells are similar to a battery in their degrading process (see Why lithium ion batteries die so young), and fuel cell stacks, like a battery, have an anode and cathode portions. Fuel cells also run at high temperatures, which is another reason these systems degrade quickly. The short life span of the hot box is a key problem for the capital costs of fuel cell makers. The hot box can make up a significant portion of the fuel cell, and I’ve heard as high as 50 to 75 percent of the cost of the system. That cost can be lower, however, and for example ClearEdge Power’s VP of Marketing Mike Upp told me that the stacks in a ClearEdge fuel cell can make up 25 to 30 percent of the cost of the system. Costs Climb  Fuel cell makers are toiling away at trying to extend the life time of the hot box, as well as reduce overall manufacturing costs. Upp said that while the stacks in ClearEdge’s first iteration of its fuel cell last 3 to 5 years, the company’s engineers are working on doubling and tripling that lifetime every few years. Stacks can also be recycled, which can reduce the overall capital costs.
Fuel cell makers are spending a lot on R&D trying to find these stack lifetime breakthroughs, but are also looking to reduce costs via reaching economies of scale of manufacturing. The idea is even if the stacks don’t last longer in the future, they can ultimately be cheaper to produce. Bloom Energy has been scaling up manufacturing of its solid oxide fuel cells, and NEA Partner Scott Sandell told me back when Bloom launched that it would be the economies of scale that would push down costs dramatically over the years. I heard a rumor recently that Bloom Energy had closed yet another round of $150 million in funding, which would bring its funding raised to over $550 million. Earlier this year VentureWire reported that Bloom had quietly raised about $100 million more in equity, above its confirmed $400 million. No doubt part of these funds are going to both R&D to extend the life of the hot box, as well as the capital costs to actually replace the hot boxes for its first customers. We’ll see if any of the leading fuel cell makers can effectively reduce their costs enough, and lengthen the lifetime of the hot box. If they are successful with that, then more of these companies could be profitable one day. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  14 years ago when Chuck Robbins started at Cisco, "you had a desk and you put your name outside the desk." Now after more than a decade, the workstyle at the company has changed nearly beyond recognition, becoming incredibly accommodating to remote teams. And Robbins has thrived in this innovate environment, rising to the position of senior VP and running the organization's sales team for the Americas.
What lessons has Robbins learned from leading through this transition at company that was not only an early adopter of flexible working, but which also builds a number of remote work solutions? He shared his wisdom with WebWorkerDaily. Talent Do experienced managers of co-located teams just magically make a smooth transition to a virtual workstyle? Not according to Robbins, who is a big believer in training, and not just on the technical challenges of web work. "The technology actually tends to be the easiest part of this whole thing," he told us, adding that the success of web work is often inhibited by "cultural acceptance by the leadership team that this is how we operate and it's OK. Some companies equate productivity with being in the office, so I think, first of all, we have to make sure that we provide our leadership with education on things around, how do you manage a remote workforce effectively? What are the things you need to do differently when you can't walk down the hall and grab them? We give that kind of training." Tools Robbins's pro-training philosophy extends to tech tools as well. He explains that team members are also trained in how to make the best use the of video conferencing solutions Cisco offers, answering questions like, "What sort of things should you be thinking about when you're presenting to a customer over video and you're not in the room and everybody else is? Or if you're in the room and somebody else is remote, how do you make sure you continue to engage them?" Video may play a big role for Robbins's team, but email doesn't. "Email is becoming the least favorite mode of communication with our team," he said. Instead of sending individual messages, Robbins's employees have "a new platform that we actually designed called Quad. It's named after the college campus quad where everybody gathers. Think of it as Facebook for enterprise. People can build communities around different topics and they have their profile and their status and then we have integrated instant messaging." "New technology that enables single number reach for our sales organization," is the final piece of the puzzle for Robbins's team. "No matter where you are somebody doesn't have to keep up with what phone numbers to dial. They dial your office and it rings whatever device you need it to ring," he said. Tips In addition to tech and training, Robbins relies on an outcome-based management style to keep his team running smoothly. To succeed as the manager of a virtual team, "you have move to outcome-based performance, and to the extent that you can, outcome based compensation," he advises. "That cultural thinking that, if you're at your desk from eight to five, than you've been productive is no longer valid, so you've got to figure out how you create outcomes and metrics where you can determine success." All of these pieces have come together to create a deep change in attitudes towards flexible working at Cisco, Robbins concludes. "When we first started working from home, for some reason we didn't want people to know we were working from home. You didn't want the dog to bark or the kids to come and say something. You were always trying to mute if the dog was coming around. Today, if you're working from home and your kid walks in, you tell them to say hello to whoever you're talking to on the other end because it's such an accepted thing." Think something similar won't be coming to your company anytime soon? Think again, insists Robbins. "Any companies that don't think they're going to have to buy in to this approach, I think they're going to be in trouble. For the first time ever we have conversations with companies about how to build their remote worker infrastructure and their collaboration capability in a way that will enable them to recruit the next generation workforce, because they believe that will be a retention issue. It's become a strategic recruiting tool for many companies." Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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It was a year ago when Andy Baio posted this tweet, and in his (far less than) 140 characters perfectly captured the key elements in this blog post: trending topics, geographies, and exogenous/endogenous events. Indeed, as Danah Boyd also pointed out on her blog, There are two types of trending topics on Twitter: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous TTs happen when a topic has a viral spread. Once it becomes a TT, everyone jumps onto it to spread it even further. So when we see a hashtag like #intenyears we know it didn't happen naturally [snip]. Exogenous TTs happen when everyone is talking about the same thing simultaneously, not really responding to each other or to the trending topic per say but responding to a cultural moment. This often happens when there are major new events or TV shows that are broadcasting something of great interest.
There is some value judgment implicit in Danah’s post, which I still cannot pinpoint quite clearly; but it does seem that exogenous trends are of some higher value, perhaps because they reflect on events that occur in the physical world, not just the virtual one (granted, virtual events can eventually spread to the real world and affect it — ask Anthony Weiner — but it is not clear how often that happens). My co-authors and I recently published a paper (pdf) that asked two related questions: What types of trending topics can be captured in Twitter data (using standard techniques)? What are the important dimensions according to which these trends can be characterized, and what are the key distinguishing features of trends that can assist in automatically categorizing and differentiating the different trending topics?  To keep this post short, I would just mention that we did some qualitative coding and affinity analysis of a sample of trends from one geographic location (New York). This is with a computer science PhD student — Hila Becker — in her first dwelling into qualitative methods (yes, I am pretty proud of that, and her; Luis Gravano is another co-author on this NSF-funded work). The emerging categories we identified were split into “endogenous” and “exogenous” types, and included categories like breaking news events, broadcast media events (like the type Danah alludes to), planned events (like the pep rally mentions in Danah’s post) and so forth.
We quickly transitioned to more traditional computer science tools, and took a sample of trends and all their associated data: tweets, networks of users and a bunch of derived variables (or “features”). The features were chosen with the hypothesis that they can help us automatically differentiate between different types of trends. We grouped these computed features into five categories: - Content features (based on the content of messages for the trend, e.g., proportion of posts with URLs)
- Interaction features (the characteristics of conversation/social interaction in the trend’s content)
- Time features (how quickly the trend develops and dies)
- Participation features (how spread out versus centralized the trend is — are there a few key users posting content or not)
- Social network features (how dense is the network between users posting about that trend)
The social network features, for example, can perhaps help differentiate exogenous trends (where many people at once react to the same “event”) and endogenous trends (that may spread through connected people in the Twitter network). And indeed, as we show in the paper, that set of features did turn out to be different, in general, between endogenous and exogenous trends. I leave you with the full paper to get more details about differences between trend types (clue: Table 5). However, this finding begs the question: can we use these features to automatically classify trends into exogenous or endogenous ones? Well yes we can, at least to some degree. We show this result in our most recent paper, “Beyond Trending Topics: Real-World Event Identification on Twitter” (pdf, to be presented in Barcelona next week at the ICWSM conference). While we use a slightly different method to compute and detect “message clusters” (such as tweets that correspond to the same topic), we show that we can pretty robustly classify these clusters into those that reflect some real-world occurrence, and those that do not. Future work: show that this works with the full stream of Twitter data, and how early we can do it after the new trending topic was detected. In the meantime, in our second ICWSM paper, we show that we can also select top representative tweets for each cluster. So, if we were in Portland with @waxpancake, our system could perhaps show that #rain is *not* a “Justin Beiber” because unlike most tweets about the young pop star, rain tweets and trending topics will correspond to a real-world occurrence (note to Bieber fans: I am not saying he is not real, but I guess this depends how you define "real"). There are many other interesting social media papers at ICWSM, so be sure to check them out. Mor Naaman is a professor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information where he directs the Social Media Information Lab. He is a former Yahoo! Researcher, Stanford PhD student, and professional basketball player. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Earlier this week, McAfee published information about a new cyber security threat it dubbed "Operation Shady RAT". Operation Shady RAT, and others like it that have emerged over the past months, represent a new kind of cyber crime called Advanced Persistent Threats. These threats are a step-up in computer crime: they are massive, they target specific high-value data, and they lie dormant, undetected within computer systems, until remotely activated. These threats target specific high-value data, not just credit cards and customer account data but often records, in the form of email, legal contracts, design schematics, operational plans and images, pertaining to IP and trade secrets,
In the specific case of Shady RAT, spear fishing emails were sent to the target containing links to a web page that when clicked on automatically loaded a malicious remote access tool (RAT) program on the computer, thus gaining access to the network and the high-value information. The new security threats. In the "old" days, it was fairly straightforward to imagine boundaries around your business data. Today, it's fair to say, with the rapid adoption of cloud and mobile computing, and the overall consumerization of IT, traditional boundaries have become fluid and, in most cases, non-existent. In today's world, hackers have figured out how to target the data when it is most exposed, whether it's on a corporate server, an iPhone, or in the cloud. In this new IT world without boundaries the traditional 'layered' approach to enterprise data security becomes ineffective. Instead of assuming that data perimeter protection (protecting the networks and data 'containers') will keep data safe, we need to assume the bad guys are smart enough to not care about the containers and to instead attack the data. As the continued severity of data breaches show, bad guys are interested in the data itself, whenever it might be, and whenever they decide the time is right to strike. What do we do in this new world? How do we protect data so that it is locked down and unusable by the bad guys while it is still accessible to those who need to use it for business purposes? While we can't ignore the old approaches and steps for data protection, such as protecting IT infrastructure and putting in place effective monitoring approaches, we need a new step. Encryption, and not the traditional public key encryption, is the only way to keep sensitive data protected while at the same time keeping it usable. Secure the data, not the perimeter. Protecting private and sensitive data in a cloud/mobile world is difficult, expensive and increasingly mandatory to comply with federal and state regulations as well as to protect brand and business reputations. Thus, we need to think about data protection from a data-centric point of view where the data itself is protected. When you start thinking about how to protect your data in a world without boundaries, think about these four things: Monitoring matters. Monitoring is an essential component of your overall security; network monitoring and database monitoring solutions help identify the kinds of attacks that are all around, such as script kiddies. They are also very useful for identifying internal threats such as unauthorized access to the database. These approaches give you a lot of information about what has happened but they don’t actually stop an attacker from getting high value data. Keep data safe when it’s on the move. Of course not all encryption is created equal, many encryption solutions are like bank vaults, they protect the money, but as soon as the money is moved, or thieves break in and steal the money, the money is out in the open and can be used. So now, many banks use dye protection packs which make the cash useless if it is stolen, as soon the cash is removed from the vault the dye packs explode making it clear the cash has been stolen. A data-centric encryption approach renders stolen data useless to the attacker. Protect your keys. Encryption and other types of protection means there are keys or tables involved that can give you access to the original data, these must be protected too. The best security solutions have keys that are never stored, so they can’t be stolen. The keys are computed only as needed. The recent RSA SecureID breach illustrates that hackers are getting more sophisticated and are going after keys. Make yourself less of a target. The price for credit card data has dropped from $500 per 'gold' card to less than $50, driving attackers to plan and execute more sophisticated attacks designed to pull out more valuable data. this includes trade secrets, legal documents, more complete customer records than can be mined for high net worth individuals, etc. Hackers look for the highest reward, profits or publicity, with the lowest protections in place. If they hack you and all they get is encrypted data they will move on. We can win. We can beat the bad guys. We have the technology to stop these new advanced persistent threats. Data-centric protection focuses on encrypting the digital assets, emails, documents, database records, in a way that they remain encrypted wherever they go. If they are stolen, those assets cannot be used, credit cards will not validate, emails will show up garbled and documents will not reveal their contents. Format Preserving Encryption (FPE/FFX) which is the encryption technology underlying data-centric encryption is being standardized by NIST and is backed by several solution providers Voltage, Verifone and Ingenico. With Shady RAT, data-centric encryption would not have stopped the programs from taking the data, but they would prevent the attackers from using it. Data–centric encryption turns gold into straw, making the data useless. Matt Pauker is Co-founder of Voltage Security. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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