Last week on his blog, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz diagnosed ” Second Startup Syndrome ,” a condition that many successful entrepreneurs often suffer from. Second Startup Syndrome, says Horowitz, can derail entrepreneurs as they move from one successful startup to founding their next company. Second Startup Syndrome places too much emphasis on business models and not enough on developing the core product, says Horowitz. The company glosses over important details “assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time.” Sponsor But even without suffering from Second Startup Syndrome, a second startup can simply fail to get off the ground. Markets, technologies can quickly change. Past Results Not Indicative of Future Performance Such was the case with Jeff Ready’s company Volt Capital. Ready had planned for Volt Capital to take advantage of some of the natural language processing technology of his past company Corvigo, a successful anti-spam service that he’d just founded and sold. Volt Capital was designed to be a hedge fund, utilizing some of the AI expertise to analyze the stock market. But due to a combination of factors – even before the economy took a nosedive – Volt Capital never got off the ground. Ready was stuck with a major technology investment that he used to successful launch his most recent company, Scale Computing , a data storage service. Volt Capital had built a supercomputer in order to store and process the information it would receive daily from the markets — around 40-60 GB per day. At first, says Ready, he and his business partners thought they would use this hardware to start a virtualization service. After all, VMWare had just gone public and it seemed a good market. But as Ready started to do some research, he found that he’d be better off working to address a storage, rather than a virtualization, solution. Listen and Learn Although it’s easier, perhaps, to learn from a mistake, Ready says it’s just as important for entrepreneurs to learn from their successes as well. You cannot simply assume that because something worked in one company that it will transfer to another. Evolve your idea “before you write a line of code,” urges Ready. He stresses the importance of doing the right research before your engineers get to work. And while plenty can be found via Google, sometimes it’s best to go to people directly. “Cold calling,” recommends Ready, who picked up the phone himself and surveyed a variety of businesses in order to gauge where to develop his next business. It sounds intimidating, perhaps, but these aren’t sales calls. You’re asking for advice, says Ready, and you can earnestly tell the recipient of your call that it’ll be “the most interesting phone conversation you have that day.” These phone conversations can provide you with a good glimpse into the direction of the industry and into the minds of your potential customers. The conversations can provide powerful anecdotes when you make pitches to investors, adds Ready. And these people make great call-backs when you can offer them beta access to your new product or service. The approach that Ready took with forging the direction for Scale Computing placed a lot of value on being “genuine, candid, and useful.” It seems as though these qualities might be good antidotes to Second Startup Syndrome. Discuss

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An interesting chart released from Morgan Stanley Research this morning shows that during the month of April – the month the iPad launched – netbook sales stalled. Did the iPad really have that much impact on an industry that was once the fastest-growing segment of the PC market? Or was the netbook’s fall from grace bound to happen at some point, with or without the Apple tablet’s help, as consumers discovered how hard it is to type on those tiny keyboards? Sponsor The netbook market saw incredible growth around this time last year. CNNMoney’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt , who uncovered the chart in a research report about HP’s acquisition of Palm, notes that netbook sales peaked last summer at “an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate .” But in January, coincidentally (or not?) the same month that Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the forthcoming tablet computer dubbed the iPad, netbook sales took a nose dive. But by nose dive, we mean they only saw 68% year-over-year growth during this time frame, the first month of the new year. That’s not actually all that bad, is it? It only looks bad in comparison to the incredible numbers netbooks saw last summer. But what’s more telling is that the numbers continued to trend downwards since then: 53% in February, 25% in March and a meager 5% in April. Did consumers rush out and buy iPads instead of netbooks? Or do they plan to at some point, a decision which is now affecting netbook sales? Considering that the pre-iPad month of December saw a still respectable 179% year-over-year growth for the netbook market, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Apple’s news and the netbook market as a whole. Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty certainly does, claiming the tanking sales are “collateral damage,” says DeWitt , from Apple’s tablet announcement and launch. iPad Cannibalizing Other Markets In case you’re still not convinced that this correlation is also causation, Huberty digs up a Morgan Stanley/Alphawise survey from March focused on consumer buying intent. Here, she found that 44% of U.S. consumers planned to buy an iPad instead of a notebook or netbook computer. Apple’s Initial Supply Struggles Apple, too, was caught a little off-guard by the iPad’s initial success, which led to supply issues that delayed the international launch by a month. On May 3, the company released a statement which quoted Jobs as saying that iPad “demand continues to exceed supply…” Some have claimed that Apple is creating artificial demand for the product to generate interest, but analysts believe that Apple is just having difficulty scaling up production due to manufacturing complexity. However, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall says the learning curve the company is facing is “only temporary.” Even with production delays, Apple sold 1 million iPads in 28 days, touts a recent press release – “less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone,” it reads. Clearly, there is still a pent-up desire for low-cost, portable computing, but it seems the tide may be shifting from netbook-sized “totables” to touch-screens. Discuss

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In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , we’re outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location , Internet of Things , Augmented Reality , and mobile social networking . We’ll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , a 1-day event we’re running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That’s the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you’ll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now . Sponsor Geo-location Services In January, RWW Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that the era of Location-as-Platform has arrived . Using leading location mobile service Foursquare as an example, Marshall wrote that “the mobile location ‘check-in’ is fast becoming the hot new status message type online.” He added that “it was only a matter of time until ‘where you are’ became a platform to build added value on top of just like ‘who you know’ has on social networking sites like Facebook.” ‘Where you are’ is the new ‘who you know’! The use cases for location data include showing nearby restaurants and ratings, mobile advertising, local news, events, and Wikipedia data about local buildings. That’s impressive enough, but imagine the possibilities when you add data from sensors . As I wrote in January, one use case that should become reality soon is receiving a real-time update of traffic conditions via sensors embedded in the road. What else can we do using location as a platform? We’ll discuss this in-depth at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . Internet of Things As well as sensor applications, there are other emerging applications for mobile that intersect with the Internet of Things trend. They include barcode scanning, using your phone as an RFID tag and reader, and using your phone as a proximity sensor. As we explained in January , as well as your mobile phone reading and acting on sensor data from real world objects, the phone may also be used as a sensor itself. For example the iPhone has a built-in accelerometer, which is basically a motion detector. This is used for game control and also for re-sizing your iPhone display from portrait to landscape. The iPhone also has a microphone (which can be used as a noise sensor), a proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor. Barcode scanning and its applications is a fast growing market in the mobile world. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for “Quick Response”), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. There are many emerging opportunities to utilize sensor and RFID data, which again we will explore at the Mobile Summit on 7 May. Augmented Reality Augmented Reality has been one of the hottest trends in mobile for about a year now. ReadWriteWeb even created an extensive report about AR and its market and development opportunities. We think that AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more this year. In our report, we profiled key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. In a recent post, Chris Cameron (the author of our AR report) noted that practical application is the golden ticket of Augmented Reality . As an example he pointed to the junaio iPhone application, which competes with Layar and Wikitude in the AR browser space. junaio recently announced that its formed a partnership with BART, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, to bring live train data to the app. junaio takes advantage of the API provided by BART to not only place locations of nearby stations in a user’s field of vision, but also estimate arrival time of trains at each station and display that live in real-time using AR. Mobile Social Networking A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez concluded that “the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.” The study found that during the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spend on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. Sarah commented that it’s no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook’s popularity, because “it has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people’s attention whenever they have free time, instead of an activity that requires people make time for it.” Sarah concluded that mobile social networking is an easier activity to participate in now that it’s been unchained from the PC. This of course has big implications for entrepreneurs and application developers, which we will explore at the RWW Mobile Summit. In Part 3 of this series outlining 10 big trends in Mobile in 2010, we will look at Mobile Business trends. We’d love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss

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Geolocation is quickly emerging as a big new platform to build all kinds of cool services on top of. While there’s a whole lot of potential – there’s also growing concern about the privacy implications of this flush of data about where we are. Thus it’s timely that a committee of the US House of Representatives is holding a hearing next week to investigate the issues between commercial use of location data and consumer privacy. Below you’ll find information about that hearing and five other top stories from the past 24 hours around the web on geolocation, selected with assistance from OneSpot . Speaking of location, watch this space for forthcoming announcements about ReadWriteWeb research reports and events focused on location as a platform. Sponsor “It seems that over the years whenever LBS [location based system] technology makes advances into the consumer space the topic of privacy and security creeps up – and for good reason,” writes Glenn Letham of GISuser . Letham first spotted next week’s hearing titled Joint Hearing On “The Collection And Use Of Location Information For Commercial Purposes . (He describes his relationship with the hearing in comments below.) It is scheduled for next Wednesday at 10 AM EST. We’ve requested the list of hearing witnesses from the committee and will update this post when we find out who will be speaking. Best Practices Already Being Hashed Out One likely suspect is Loopt , a very popular location based social network that transmits passive location data to a user’s chosen network of friends and allows them to push selected location updates out into public networks like Facebook and Twitter. Loopt CEO Sam Altman says he doesn’t know if anyone from his company is speaking at the hearing but that Loopt team members have testified before Congress about user privacy before and found it quite productive. Brian R. Knapp, Chief Privacy Officer and General Counsel at Loopt, says he’s been helping people from some other companies prepare for the hearing next week. Altman says Loopt keeps a close eye out for abuse cases and has instituted warning systems like algorithmic monitoring of user behavior, SMS messages to make sure users know they are tracking their location and postal mail sent to the homes of children who sign in. Altman says Loopt participated extensively in the writing of the CTIA best practices document for user location data . Does Altman think the location based economy needs some regulation? “I come up on the Libertarian side of government regulation,” he told us, “but it’s bad for everyone if someone is playing fast and loose with location data and something bad happens. Regulation may be too strong a word but we need some understanding industry-wide about how to respect privacy and keep people safe.” While many location apps are based on explicit “check-ins” by users and others ask users to opt-in to allowing a service to know their location so that location-features may be leveraged, Altman believes that ongoing, passive location tracking will become more common in the future. “When passive location becomes mainstream,” he told us, “and I think it will because there are so many upsides, over the next 6 months it’s going to become more important that everyone do it the right way.” Location as a platform and the privacy challenges therein are going to be hot topics this year. Stick with ReadWriteWeb for ongoing coverage. In other location news today… MWC: Smaato Eyes Geo-Ad Markets Outside US GPS BUSINESS NEWS “Activity in the location-based advertising market is growing rapidly and not just in North America. That’s according to Ramy Yared, managing director of adsmobi, the newly-established media buying arm of mobile advertising firm Smaato…A recent report from JP Morgan’s analyst Imran Kahn forecast that mobile advertising is set to grow 45% to USD3.8 billion in 2010.” TomTom posts solid Q4 results GPS BUSINESS NEWS “TomTom today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009. During the fourth quarter 2009 the revenue of the Dutch company was €533 million, up one percent against the previous year…TomTom also gave guidance for 2010: ‘We expect broadly flat revenue and earnings per share in 2010 compared with 2009′, adding that ‘we made our assumptions bearing in mind that free turn-by-turn navigation on some smartphone platforms will be available in our major markets.’” Ski gloves now record your GPS coordinates GPS Obsessed “Austria’s Zanier have announced a ski glove model with integrated GPS. Dubbed the X-Plore.XGX, the gloves help you follow a route or get back to your car along with recording important ski-related info such as altitude, speed and distance.” ESRI Announces Relationship with Amazon Web Services GIS and Science “As part of its commitment to support cloud computing, ESRI is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join the growing community of AWS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) building services and solutions in the cloud computing environment.” Waze Partners with Intermap: European Bbasemap + Mobile Community GPS BUSINESS NEWS “Geospatial content provider Intermap and user-generated maps and real-time traffic start-up Waze have entered into an agreement where Intermap will supply its European road basemap to Waze and Waze will provide Intermap with live data, consisting of anonymous GPS points – latitude, longitude, and height measurements – sourced from its user’s community. ” Intermap provides geometric datasets and focuses on topography. Discuss

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