Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There’s one article called “Innovation’s Next Decade” which you will find interesting. That article will probably address the kind of things that you’re talking about.

Yaacov Cohen: I believe also in the convergence of ethics and technology. Spirituality and technology needs to be better converged. Technology won’t free humanity.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 5)

Yaacov Cohen: The enterprise is a lot more heterogeneous. It used to be controlled by three to five vendors. It’s a lot more diverse, because I can have a cloud service for pretty much anything in the enterprise. I think the mega trend here is enterprise mobility and it includes cloud services, BYOD, devices, and security. I think that’s the landscape. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a cloud services business model?

Yaacov Cohen: We are running as a mobile application on iOs, Androids, Blackberries, as well as desktops and laptops. We have multiple delivery models on mobile, cloud, and desktop. We’re trying to deliver this business consumer experience across all platforms. One of the big things is that we are delivering this one-screen experience across all devices.

Sramana Mitra: You have some sort of consolidated composite application layer that you have configured that you feed into multiple device form factors from that composite front-end?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 3)

Yaacov Cohen: Let’s say, if I want to look for a specific life insurance policy. I want to see who among my colleagues have been able to tailor an insurance portfolio to a specific scenario. I want to be able to use tags which are describing the specific scenario to search across a million documents and to retrieve the five documents which are relevant to me for this particular insurance situation. That’s the type of scenario that we see where you need to build a knowledge center rather than simply store a document.

Sramana Mitra: What does your competitive landscape look like? Whom do you consider as direct and indirect competitors?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about the other different use cases that you’re seeing for the solution you’re offering. You took off through the investment banking use case. Are we talking more of a sales kind of scenario? Do you want people who are in sales situations to have access to their colleagues and information to interact with clients?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 1)

This interview explores how enterprises are using composite mobile apps that bring various cloud and mobile services together on a device.

Sramana Mitra: Yaacov, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Harmon.ie.

Yaacov Cohen: Thank you for having me, Sramana. My name is Yaacov Cohen and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Harmon.ie. I am a global entrepreneur. I grew up in France but I lived 25 years in Israel and 5 years in Silicon Valley. Harmon.ie is an enterprise mobile vendor and our mission is to define the business consumer experience in the mobile enterprise. >>>

Trend Spotting: Serial Entrepreneurs Are Self-Financing Ventures

As you know, we have an extensive coverage of entrepreneurs and their business strategies on the 1Mby1M blog. This coverage has been going on since 2006, so today, this is where you will find the most comprehensive selection of entrepreneur case studies.

This steadfast tracking of entrepreneurship gives us a unique view into the trends shaping our industry. One of them, and I have noticed this trend developing over a period of time now, not just in 2013, is that serial entrepreneurs with success under their belts are self-financing companies a lot more than they did before.

Our recent story, Bootstrapping an App to $10M in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe, highlights this trend in yet another wonderful case study.

TextMe is Christophe’s third venture. He and his cofounder put in $1M into the company, and has raised no outside financing thus far. The company has monetized its free TextMe communication app right from the get go, and is now doing $10M in profitable revenue.

I love the story, because it is perfectly aligned with our philosophy: entrepreneurs should work hard so that the negotiating leverage in fund-raising is with them, not with investors.

Of course, what drives this trend is that it is much cheaper now to build a company. TextMe has only 12 employees, and with that, they have scaled to $10M. Lean startup at its best, I would say.

And, hold your breath, they achieved this amazing feat in less than two years.

I believe, this trend is here to stay.

Of course, $1M is not an insignificant amount of capital, and unless you’re a successful serial entrepreneur team, you cannot pull this kind of money together from your own resources. However, a small friends-and-family round of financing, or even an angel round can provide just enough capital such that you won’t need to raise gobs of venture capital to scale a business.

And once you have found the inflection point, if it makes sense, you can raise a larger VC round with minimum dilution, maximum negotiating leverage.

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

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