Have you heard of MobuzzTV? If not, you are missing something big. If yes, well then you already know MobuzzTV is an award-winning online TV network. A kind of CNN 2.0. Every day, MobuzzTV produces and broadcasts 5 different shows in 3 languages for the web and any video-enabled mobile device out there (phone, iPod, PSP, etc).

As it happens, MobuzzTV is based in Madrid and its founder, Anil de Mello, recently invited me to visit his headquarter and offered me a job. I am now happy to officially announce I have moved from Prague to Madrid to become MobuzzTV’s new Chief Operations Officer.

For the past 12 years, I have been running Internet Start-Ups in Paris, London and Prague so I thought Madrid was not a bad location for my next career move. More seriously, I wanted to share in this blog post the top reasons why I have decided to join MobuzzTV.

1/ The team.
You know a company is healthy just by looking at the moral of its team. The first thing that stroke me when I entered their offices was the overall feeling of happiness. It was one of these “if you are having so much fun at work, you must be doing well” moment. I guess the fact they have cute and energetic female blond presenters walking around is good for the moral of the opposite sex. Recently we have been joined by GabeMac who, bless him, miserably fails in the blond female department.

2/ The space
Online videos is a fast growing space and with the global rollout of broadband and super broadband, the web needs more quality content (Would you like more Mentos with your Diet Coke?). This is how MobuzzTV is positioned: Professional Content. Each program is hosted by a talented presenter and targets a different audience. We shoot and edit our own programs in our TV studio in Madrid before it becomes available on the web, in iTunes and on your mobile video device.

3/ The Founder
I first met Anil de Mello 2 years ago at the Monaco Media Forum and we immediately realized we were on the same wave length. Like me, Anil is a serial entrepreneur and has been carrying MobuzzTV on his shoulders for the last 3 years. We complement each other very well (he’s chaotic and I’m maniac) so I’m very excited to help him build on his vision for the company. Amongst MobuzzTV shareholders we have Martin Varsavsky another succesfull serial entrepreneur and Enrique Dans, a professor in one of the top business school in the world and one of the leading Spanish blogger.

4/ The Company’s success so far
Like most internet start-ups, MobuzzTV was started in Anil’s spare bedroom. In 3 years, MobuzzTV shows have been viewed 500 million times. Currently, shows are viewed more than 6.5 million times per month. Recently, MobuzzTV has attracted top-tier brands (Levi’s, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Honda, Adidas, Disney amongst others) as sponsors. In other words, we are talking here about a growing award winning start-up with existing revenues (how peculiar I know!).

5/ The potential
MobuzzTV has great potential both in term of audience and revenue growth. We are already planning to launch a few new shows before the end of the year and we are lining up a few renowned partners to work with us. In fact we have some really cool news coming which we will announce in the next few weeks.

6/ Do what I do best: build and be creative.
I can’t help it, I like building things (as long as it does not involve a drilling machine) and even though MobuzzTV has some solid foundations, there is a lot to do to take it to the next stage. MobuzzTV also offers me the opportunity to be creative by improving the existing shows and imagining new ones. Very little people know that on top of my degree in Artificial Intelligence, I also studied acting for 5 years so I’m thrilled to be able to work with the presenting team and hopefully give them some useful advices.

7/ Be a TV Presenter
As if the role of COO was not fulfilling enough, Anil has decided to launch a new show about MobuzzTV called UnBuzzed which will be hosted by him and I. Our initial camera test is online so if you want to have a laugh with us, you can watch it here. We certainly had a good time recording it. Hopefully for our 1st show we will find things to talk about

For these reasons above, added to Anil’s promise to feed me with free tapas everyday and margaritas once a week, I decided to leave Prague 4 years to the day after I landed there with my suitcase to sleep in Matt’s lounge and build AllPeers.

So now I just need to refresh my Spanish. Surely it will be easier than the Czech language! Claro.

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TechCrunch is running a guest post of mine about the exciting new field of site-specific browsers. Needless to say, it’s a honor to be on TechCrunch, and I hope my article will help to increase awareness of what SSBs are and why they’re important. Personally I’m convinced that they represent the future of web apps.

I haven’t seen any sign yet of the “gaggles of groupies” that Mike promises in the post’s comments, but I’m sneaking out the back door to pick up a sombrero and some wraparound sunglasses, just in case.

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Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis caused a blogostorm with his candid treatise on making every startup dollar count. The controversy is not especially surprising when his list of tips for thrifty includes such items as “fire people who are not workaholics” (which provoked so much ire that he felt compelled to change it to “fire people who don’t love their work”). Some went as far as to label Calacanis a “prick“, with the obligatory observation that they’ve never heard or his company, but love to death the products of cooler companies who pay for their employees to go backpacking.

I’ve seen both approaches in action in my day. More than one startup founder has told me that they keep the hours reasonable because they “don’t want to burn out their staff.” Sorry, but what I heard was “I’m too lazy to work long hours so I can’t expect my staff to.” Of course, it depends to some degree on your ambitions. If your goal is to earn a good living with a bunch of smart, like-minded folks tackling some not-too-intractable problem, with plenty of free time to bungee jump from helicopters or make erotic origami, that is doable. But if you want to create a world-beating company, Mike Arrington has it nailed: your odds of succeeding are long enough without four-day weeks and ambling trips to the local juice bar five times a day.

Besides which, software geeks don’t have the same view of life/work balance as most people. In their response to Jason’s post, 37signals explain that:

Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

Probably the guy who wrote this is a graphic designer or something, since for all the real programmers I know, the most interesting subject imaginable is the software project they are currently working on. That’s why our social skills suck so bad. When we run into someone who isn’t a geek, we have no idea what to talk about. Naturally this gets old eventually, and even the pocket protector set ends up settling down, getting a dog and starting a family. Ever wonder why most startups are populated mainly with 20-somethings?

Which brings me to my real point: in light of this state of affairs, does Europe have a chance in the software biz? I’ve been working in European software startups for 15 years (and running them for 10). Having grown up in America, I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of obsessiveness when it comes to driving the company’s success. Programmers on this side of the pond work a lot harder than, say, post office clerks, but traditionally it’s still been a far cry from the mattress-under-your-desk workathon of the American startup nerd. When Arrington mocked the idea of “three weeks vacation” I had to smile. Over here, the big question is whether we can beat our staff down from five to only four weeks.

The good news is that the situation is changing. I’m seeing more and more startups built up around the American model. Globalization, more awareness of “cool” company cultures like Google’s and a few European home runs (such as Skype) are helping to reshape attitudes on this side of the pond. Lack of precedents for success, paucity of venture capital, stifling regulation and excessive risk aversion have conspired with our generally sedate work habits to lock Europeans into second-class citizen status in the software world. As we overcome these obstacles, I expect we’ll mount a much more credible challenge to America’s technological dominance.

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It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

The past few years have been an incredible adventure for us. We would like to thank all of the amazing people who have helped us along the way. This includes countless users who provided us with valuable feedback about how to improve our product; the Mozilla community, who has proven to us that “community” is more than just a word when it comes to open source software; the many volunteers who spent hours translating each AllPeers version into fifteen different languages to make it available to non-English speakers across the world; and the friends and family who have supported us as we pursued what undoubtedly seemed like a crazy dream.

Being an entrepreneur is the most rewarding and exhilarating job we can imagine. Being able to build on a vision you have one morning and watch as it grows into reality is quite an experience. Seeing people get excited by what you are building is incredibly gratifying. The praise, devotion and even harsh criticism of the user community is what keeps you going despite long working hours, frequent stress and periods of uncertainty.

When we started working on AllPeers, we knew that it was an ambitious project with no guarantee of success. Such is the nature of any software startup. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Although we are deeply disappointed with the way this adventure has ended, we hope that fear of failure will never prevent us from daring to act on our inspiration.

We have met many many new friends thanks to AllPeers (you know who you are). This is a fantastic silver lining that gives us great comfort. We hope you will stay in touch as we move on to new pastures.

The success of this blog has also been one of the best experiences to come out of AllPeers. We will continue to operate it under the “Peer Pressure” name, posting our random thoughts about the web, the software industry, the evolution of media and whatever else strikes our fancy. We hope you’ll keep on reading. Matt will also continue writing his Just Browsing blog with a focus on web browsers and browser technology.

You haven’t heard the last from us. See you in our next life!

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You think you’ve put it all behind you, but one tiny script and you tumble off the wagon. Such is the fate of the Greasemonkey addict. Someone mentioned yesterday that MXR search results should include a link to CVS Blame. (Regular readers of this blog are used to ignoring me when they don’t know what I’m talking about, right?) Rumor has it that real support for this is in the works, but I went ahead and wrote a script, just because I could. After all, the hallmarks of a good Greasemonkey script are quick-and-dirty hacks and planned obsolescence, and this one emphatically has both:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Add MXR blame links
// @namespace      http://justdiscourse.com
// @description    Add links to CVS Blame to MXR search results
// @include        http://mxr.mozilla.org/*search?string*
// ==/UserScript==

var results = document.getElementsByTagName("ul");
for (var i = 0; i 

Click here to install (Greasemonkey required).

It’s incredibly empowering to have this kind of client-side control over your browsing experience. One of these days someone is going to do this right and it’ll take over the world.

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The inimitable Robert X. Cringely, who writes a much-read weekly tech column for PBS, brings new insights to the white-hot Microsoft/Yahoo merger story in this week’s piece. Cringely may or may not be talking out of his hindquarters with his speculation that Microsoft’s main motivation for the takeover attempt is to achieve a culture shift inside the company, but at least he brings something new to the party. Indeed, the most interesting part of the article is arguably the first paragraph:

It’s a challenge for a journalist coming late to a story like Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo. I had literally just pressed the SEND key on last week’s column when news hit the wire. What to do? The way things are structured at PBS I couldn’t just pump out another column (that structure may be changing by the way), so the big question was whether the passage of seven days would make pointless anything I would have to say. So I waited and waited, and it is a testament to the shallowness and endless repetition of both the tech and business media that there is still plenty to say about the deal, the true nature of which few people yet understand.

Quite. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve simply become bored with the self-referential ranting of the tech blogosphere or whether it has actually become boring. I still read Techmeme every day, but I’m increasingly drawn to a select group of publishers: mainstream publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc.), a small handful of professional-quality tech news/analysis blogs (Ars Technica, Read/Write Web, sometimes TechCrunch), individuals with real credentials (Nick Carr, John Battelle, etc.), speciality blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, TorrentFreak, etc.), company blogs and the occasional random article that catches my eye.

Granted, this is still a pretty broad group, but I don’t read all of them all the time. I try to get news about a given story from the best, most authoritative sources. For example, for analysis of the Microhoo sturm und drang, I read articles in the NYT and WSJ and the announcement on Microsoft’s web site. Why would I spend the time reading six or seven rehashings on all the “A list” tech news blogs out there? What purpose do these me-too pieces actually serve?

I predict a slow decline in the number of such blogs. It’s kind of harsh to put it this bluntly, but if you don’t do any real reporting, don’t write exceptionally well and stir up interest mainly through wild speculation, your long-term prospects probably aren’t great. Instead, the mainstream news outlets (and their blogging arms, like Bits and AllThingsD) will win the battle for general tech news and analysis. They’ll buy the best blogging networks, so TechCrunch and Read/Write Web are heading for a big payday. The other A listers will fade into oblivion as tech news junkies like me realize that they have better ways to spend their time.

The other area that has a bright future is specialty blogging. Rather than reading what some dude who has built up a big audience by blogging something generic about absolutely every story that crosses the wires has to say about the ruckus du jour, folks will seek enlightenment from the blog best placed to have inside information or true insights. Incidentally, that’s one of the main reasons I decided to set up my own specialty blog, Just Browsing, rather than continue to pen my own uninformed opinion pieces on random topics here on Peer Pressure. Yes, like this one.

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If you are thinking about raising capital for the first time, The Funded has some excellent resources.

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