DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

Okay, I admit it: I like taking LinkedIn polls. Because every now and then you'll take a poll and then click through to the answer and be nicely surprised by the results. Tonight's subject: What research do you find most helpful when planning an ad campaign?

The graph shows that companies can be assumed to be divided on some of the key issues. Example: Whereas 58% of CEOs believe that psychographic data is the most reliable predictor of the success of a marketing campaign, exactly 0% of PR folks and Product Development people voted the same way.

Even more interesting - an unmeasurably small number of Product Development respondents felt that research reports on market trends were worthy of being purchased.

What this data suggest is that there is a potentially large chasm that needs to be crossed with respect to what the CEOs assume is being used for product development, PR and sales forecasting, and what they themselves are thinking (0% versus 58%).

Time to get everyone in the same room.

For months, I've been looking at the DealHorizon deal data and trying to figure out how the VCs are going to be able to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars of dry powder they currently have. My conclusion: there are not enough quality start-ups and/or proven entrepreneurs to soak up these funds.

I was planning on blogging about this later this week, but was beaten to the post by Nicolas Carlson of Silicon Valley Insider, who wrote a great post this morning about how VCs have too much money relative to the number of available companies they can invest in.

His post, which focuses on how leading VCs are lining up to invest in hot geolocation start-up FourSquare, is worth reading. I have my doubts about whether FourSquare is immune from competition (I think Twitter could very easily add precisely this kind of functionality without detracting from their core offering), and it's still relatively early in the execution cycle (they have less than a million users) to make any predictions about scale.

But that's not the point Carlson is making - Carlson is saying that FourSquare's business plan is actually largely irrelevant - and potentially high-risk. Instead, he makes the point that FourSquare is attractive because it is one of a very small number of possible investments that VCs can make.

One VC source complained to us recently that these days there are "so few deals and so much money." The VCs trying to get Foursquare agree. From their perspective, there are very few consumer-facing start-ups with the ambition of Foursquare. Foursquare is the only deal to get. Meanwhile, there's a ton of VCs firms with piles of cash. The supply and demand equation skews in Foursquare's favor.

The comment on supply and demand nails the current situation. Anyone interested in understanding the economics behind this post need only look at the dry powder sitting at any one of the top VCs and then explore the DealHorizon deal page, or PWC MoneyTree, or CrunchBase, or VentureBeat, or any similiar data set. The outflow hasn't matched the inflow for several years. There is more money coming in than going out.

Entrepreneurs, time to get busy writing those pitchbooks. The VCs need you.

Hidden in David Pogue's excellent review(s) (he did two) of the iPad in the New York Times today is a glimpse of the future of the telecommunications carrier business, and in particular, AT&T.

...how’s this for a rare deal from a cell company: there’s no contract. By tapping a button in Settings, you can order up a month of unlimited cellular Internet service for $30. Or pay $15 for 250 megabytes of Internet data; when it runs out, you can either buy another 250 megs, or just upgrade to the unlimited plan for the month. Either way, you can cancel and rejoin as often as you want — just March, July and November, for example — without penalty. The other carriers are probably cursing AT&T’s name for setting this precedent.

Now, apart from the idea of buying bandwidth by the chunk rather than the time period, this isn't a terribly different concept to Boingo or T-Mobile's Data division, which offer payments by the hour, day, etc - but it is a pretty radical step for a carrier that typically hard-bundles its services to the mobile device via a contract.

I wish this had been available twelve months ago when I became an AT&T data customer - I'm currently on a two year plan. Nice to know that's the last data service contract that I might ever have to have.

Delinking the device from a service contract is a bold move - AT&T shareholders might be smart to keep an eye on how well the company executes this strategy over the coming few years. Without a contract, customer lifetime value will be highly dependent on the level of love lavished via customer support. The old forecasting models will increasingly not apply.

Fred Wilson posted an excellent presentation to his blog the other day entitled The Ten Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. I shared this with the Heardable guys - there's a lot of similarity between how we bucket things at Heardable to make them easy to understand, and the simplicity of Fred Wilson's presentation.

One of the slides that impressed me most, mainly because I hadn't really thought about this before, was Fred's slide entitled "Playful". His argument behind this is that successful web apps maintain what he calls a "voice". The example he used was Twitter's earlier use of the "Fail Whale" to apologize for when the service was down (although I'm not sure that Twitter was invented at the top of a playground slide - I think the evolution was earlier - see my previous blog).

Fred stated that this kind of "company personality" is something they look for at Union Square Ventures, while assessing a candidate for investment. And when you look at their investments - Twitter, FourSquare, Delicious - the value of focusing on the power that a web app "personality" might have to forge a market leadership position becomes obvious.

Calling this voice/personality "playful" is a good relection of the kind of thinking going on inside the company. Which brings me to Google.

Today, the custodians of a large public company and one of the world's most valuable brands - Google - chose to remove its brand from its web site - as an April Fool's Day joke - and replace it with Topeka, the name of the Kansas town that just changed it's name to "Google".

That Google can remain playful after all these years is impressive. That Google values "playfulness" to this level - and works on enabling its personality to shine through - sends a message that all entrepreneurs can learn from.