July 8th, 2014. Imaging. The film camera business peaked in 1999.
In that year, consumers around the world took 80bn photos (according to Kodak's 2000 annual report), and bought around 70m cameras (on GfK's estimate). In 2014, perhaps 90m traditional cameras will be sold - and close to 2bn phones and tablets with cameras. There will be over 2bn iPhone and Android smartphones on earth by the end of this year: with perhaps 4bn people on earth with mobile phones, there are at least 3bn camera phones and probably over 3.5bn. A total of around 1.2bn digital cameras have been sold since 1999 - there are 1bn Google Android smartphones in use today. Over 1.5bn new photos are shared every day on Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat alone, which equates to about 550bn a year, and this is growing fast. So: I've not found any statistics for consumer video shot before digital, but it seems like a pretty safe bet that more consumer video will be shot this year than was ever shot before camera phones. BlaBlaCar Raises A Massive $100 Million Round To Create A Global Long Distance Ride-Sharing Network.
In what is the largest VC round in a French startup of all time, BlaBlaCar just raised a $100 million round led by Index Ventures, with existing investors Accel Partners, ISAI and Lead Edge Capital also participating in the round.
Previously, Deezer raised a $130 million round from Warner Music Group’s owner Access Industries, but it wasn’t VC money per se. “Our ambition is to go further than what we have today, even though we still need to consolidate what we began,” co-founder and CEO Frédéric Mazzella told me in a phone interview. “At this point, we could either try to optimize our business to become profitable, or we could invest with this proof of concept to expand now and become profitable later.” I’ll let you guess what the team chose. BlaBlaCar is a marketplace where you can find a driver who is driving from one city to another and book a seat in advance. Today’s news is also a great signal for the French tech ecosystem for two reasons. The Death of “Users” and “Product Design” — The Year of the Looking Glass. Patience & Persistence. When you go to a tech meetup, tech party, or read tech headlines, it’s easy to get swept away into thinking things are soaring for a number of startups.
Company xyz now has a zillion users, another company just went viral, overnight sensation, etc. It’s easy to fall in love with those headlines or worse, it’s easy to be distracted. The truth of the matter is that it hardly ever goes straight up and to the right. When you dig into the history of these companies the real thing to fall in love with is the founders/employees drive to dig through the pain over an extended period of unease, stress, unknown, fear and make something valuable. The story hasn’t been fully written but consider companies like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Fab, AirBnB and plenty others. They didn’t start out as rocket ship. The risk of not paying attention to the reality of how these companies evolved is that you can have unrealistic expectations - as founders, employees and investors. It took off. Elon Musk: The Role of Analogy and Reasoning From First Principles in Disruptive Entrepreneurship.
In terms of getting an insight into “Tony Stark’s” head, the last 5-ish minutes of Kevin’s Rose’s Foundation interview of Elon Musk is a gem: I think its important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy…The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy…We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done..or it is like what other people are doing…slight iterations on a theme…“First principles” is a physics way of looking at the world…what that really means is that you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there…that takes a lot more mental energy…Someone could –and people do — say battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be because that’s the way they have been in the past…They would say it’s going to cost, historically it cost $600 KW/hour.
The Founder’s Lie About Comfort Zones. There is a lot of talk going on about the endurance and struggle that startup founders go through.
How long the hours are, we all pull through and how we are constantly out of our comfort zone. We run startups – we are constantly at the border of our comfort zone. Aren’t we? No we are not. We are just better in lying - especially to ourselves I see founders… I see founders, super busy, super buzzed, some even close to burnout, working to their death… All of them super busy… …doing what they like most. All of them worried about stuff they are anyway best in. I am super busy and I do uncomfortable things…