Happy New Year 2008!

Happy New Year to you, Cracking-the-code reader! You have been 2,950 to visit the site in 2007 and you looked at 3,920 pages. This represents an outstanding 2,298% growth vs. 2006 (this type of growth seems big but you get used to it when reading business plans is you day job).
The second part of the year has seen a lower flow of blog posts, but part of my 2008 resolutions are to remedy to this shortfall, so be prepared for a strong 2008.

Looking back at 2007, I wanted to give a quick overview of the investments I have been involved with, since I have not blogged about any of them yet. Overall, I spent about 1/3 of my time looking at Web 2.0 and online gaming companies and 2/3 looking at the software and SaaS industry.


Online marketing has revolutionized consumer marketing by providing a clear return on each dollar spent and making the marketer accountable for results. In the past, CMOs used to say that half of the spend was wasted but they could not tell which half. Online marketing changed it. Eloqua is bringing this revolution to the B2B marketers by providing on-demand applications and best-practice expertise for B2B marketers to execute, automate and measure effective marketing programs that drive revenue. Today, thanks to Eloqua, CMOs have a clear visibility on their return allowing them to better allocate their budget and sales people can prioritize prospects to maximize their effectiveness.

Want to be the best marketer on earth? Watch this!



The first internet wave managed to solve pretty well the "Where to buy" problem, with sites like Kelkoo, Shopzilla, NextTag, PriceGrabber, or Shopping.com. But the key questions of "what to buy" or "which product does really fit my need and budget at the same time" remained unanswered. As more than 70% of people perform online research before buying, we felt this was a compelling need and a large market. We decided to fund Wize.com to answer this question. Wize provides consumers with a unique way to leverage the online wisdom by aggregating the opinions of millions of users and by letting people ask questions about a specific product or need to the Wize community. So next time you are looking for something to buy, think WIZE!

Cornerstone on Demand is a fast growing Learning and Talent management company based in Los Angeles. Although Learning Management is old news, Talent Management represents a broader set of emerging functionality around internal employee management and development, and has come to define the broader category which is also known as Human Capital Management. The development of this market has been accelerated by two trends: (1) the need for large and mid size companies to turn their workforce into a competitive asset by optimizing and measuring its performance and (2) the emergence of Software as a Service that reduces significantly cost and deployment time. Cornerstone is at the convergence of these trends and hopefully poised to strong growth. This has proven to be true in 2007 and we will see how resilient these trends are in a recession. We are optimistic though, as bearish markets tend to increase the need for more workforce productivity.

Intego is the leading Security Software Suite for Mac. As Mac is gaining market share (shipments have been growing 35%+ in the past years), the Mac platform becomes more attractive for spamers and hackers and Mac users need to protect their digital assets. Intego is here to help them! For those who are skeptics, check this latest Mac security alert.

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