Tioga Venture Blog

Google+: strong growth but the jury is still out

Google+ has been launched a few weeks ago and the numbers of its staggering growth are released weekly, pointing to a much faster growth than facebook or twitter.

 

The comparison is intriguing but mostly meaningless. Google+ is a service released by the most powerful internet company in the world with a user base of close to a 1bn, including hundreds of millions of gmail accounts. At the time of their launch, facebook and twitter were unknown start-ups among hundreds vying for internet users' time. They were targeting only US users or even a subset (top US universities for Facebook). On the contrary, Google has deployed a massive PR and marketing effort to convince its user base to try its service. So far, it has managed to convince 1% or 2% of its users to try Google+. Quite good but not earth shattering.

The real question for Google+ is whether it will be able to cross the chasm or not. Early adopters and geeks tend to love most products launched by Google. At its launch, Google Wave had good reviews from the tech enthusiast. The issue came when real people started trying the service and didn't see the point. As far as Google+ is concerned, I don't think that is the risk. It is a very nice service with a clean and efficient user interface. This time, I don't think there is a real risk of average users not enjoying Google+.

However, for a social network, being good is not enough. It needs to be significantly better than existing solutions (i.e. Facebook) to justify users switching. The staggering figures for Facebook is not so much the number of users (it is still very impressive) but even more the time spent per user. The stickiness is such that in many countries, Facebook is the number one website in term of time spent. The stake for Google is to have people try Google+ but beyond that, have them switch a major part of their digital life (friends, games, photos …). So what we are seeing is just the beginning of the battle between Facebook and Google who are know the major competitors in internet: they are fighting for same advertising dollars and eyeballs time.

Google+ is very good social networks and is a real alternative to Facebook but the fight for time (and not only users) is only starting.

Frederic HALLEY

Tioga Venture Partners with Tableau Software to Provide Leading Analytics Capabilities

 Paris, July 6, 2011

Tioga Venture today announced that it is officially a partner of Tableau Software, the fastest growing – according to Gartner – provider of business analytics software.

The time of 'big data' has arrived and tens of millions of lines of data daily are common while the developments of social media and e-commerce have disrupted the business intelligence (BI) world. The amount of data generated by the largest websites is massive and at the same time, the speed required to analyze this data and act on it has accelerated exponentially. The solutions from the 80s and 90s have not adapted to this new paradigm and a new generation of solutions has emerged to place the power back in the users' hands.

Tableau Software is recognized by many analysts as the foremost software to analyze 'big data'. Claiming many of the marquis e-commerce and social media companies as customers, Tableau Software has demonstrated continually that it has the capabilities to address the new challenges of data analysis, including rapid-fire processing of millions of rows of data and a visually intuitive interface to manipulate and analyze data.

Headquartered in Paris, France, Tioga Venture's expertise in technology and marketing combined with analytical skills and real business experience have allowed Tioga to significantly contribute to the success and growth of internet and e-commerce-driven companies for the past decade. Tioga will bring this expertise to Tableau, focusing on its e-commerce and internet customers.

Bruno Saint-Cast, VP European Sales at Tableau Software declares, "We are very happy to have Tioga Venture as a partner. Their expertise in e-commerce and the Internet will allow us to accelerate our growth in these sectors throughout France." Frederic Halley, Managing Partner of Tioga Venture adds, "We strongly believe that Tableau has the best solution for the data analytics of e-commerce and internet companies. Tableau's products will allow our customers to accelerate and industrialize the way they analyze data to impact their business in ways previously unavailable."


About Tableau Software

Tableau Software is the leading provider of visual analytics and rapid-fire business intelligence software. Ranked by Gartner in 2011 as the world's fastest growing business intelligence company, Tableau makes its award-winning applications available for download at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial. They enable anyone to easily create and share interactive data visualizations, dashboards and analytics from virtually any data, even massively big data, and can scale to organizations of any size or reach. For more information, please visit http://www.tableausoftware.com.

About Tioga Venture

Tioga Venture is a leading global venture consulting firm that provides expertise to companies who are positioning for significant future growth. Tioga's strategic insight, managerial expertise, and consulting services to technology ventures and executives help overcome strategic, organizational and operational challenges in sales, customer service and marketing. Clients include Microsoft, Ebay, Autodesk and Alcatel-Lucent.  Tioga Venture is headquartered in Paris with offices in Silicon Valley. For more information on Tioga Venture, visit our web site at: http://www.tiogaventure.com.