Musings of a VC in NYC

Affordable Mobile Data In Europe

For the past couple years, when I travel in europe I turn mobile data roaming off on my phone and grab wifi when I can. That's the best way to avoid ridiculous data roaming charges.

Last year, on the advice of readers of this blog, I started buying prepaid sim cards in countries where I planned on being for a few days or more. I did that in the UK last summer and it worked out well. I still have my prepaid sim card from that trip. I wonder if it still works.

When my daughter was getting ready to go to Paris for a month in mid June, I got an unlocked iPhone 4 directly from Apple (they had just started to sell it) and sent her to France with it instead of her US iPhone. I figured that our whole family could share that unlocked iPhone and use it whenever one of our iPhone users traveled outside the US.

I also DM'd a friend in Paris and asked him what prepaid plan to get. He suggested Orange's Mobicarte service. So my daughter arrived in Paris, went to an Orange store as I suggested, bought a Mobicarte sim and started using it. Within hours her phone was out of money. She emailed me and asked what was up. I suggested she go back to the Orange store and ask what was happening. Turns out she needed to get something called Internet Max on her Mobilcarte plan. Once she did that, she was in business.

Around the exact same time, my friend Brad Feld was having the exact same problem. He emailed me. I told him what I knew from my daughter's experience. But I didn't have all the details. He banged his head against the wall, broke his glasses, and finally figured it out. Thankfully, he blogged exactly how to do this so the rest of us won't have the same issues.

So I show up in Paris a few days later and confidently walk into an Orange store and buy two Mobicarte sims for the Gotham Gal and me. Armed with my daughter's experience and Brad's blog post, I figure no problem. Well not exactly. I started using mobile data on my Mobicarte sim before the Internet Max kicked in (it takes a while), and ran through all my prepaid money. I had to recharge at the local Tabac this morning and now I am set. Meanwhile the Gotham Gal's HTC G2 is apparently locked (who knew?) and we are waiting for T-Mobile to send an unlock code.

The point of all of this? It is damned hard to beat the man when it comes to mobile data in europe. I'm starting to think that turning it off and grabbing wifi here and there isn't such a bad solution. But if you want to do the local sim card thing, here are my suggestions:

1) Make sure you have a totally unlocked phone. The unlocked iPhone Apple sells online will work. So will the Nexus S. Beyond that, check before you leave home. If you need an unlock code from your carrier, plan ahead.

2) If you are coming to France, read Brad's blog post and print it out for safe measure. I used on O2 sim in the UK and it worked like a charm with no configuration needed.

3) Be prepared for stuff to go wrong. If you don't have the time and patience to deal with snafus while you are traveling, don't go down this path.

I was having lunch with a friend today who lives in Ljubiana Slovenia. We got to talking about mobile data in europe. We both felt that the EU really ought to require all the telcos operating in the region to open up to new providers so we can get a pan-european prepaid sim with a good mobile data plan. Then we'd only need to do this once and it would work everywhere in europe. And on top of that, Google should work to get Google Voice working over here as well. One can dream.

Europe

I'm off to Europe today for a week of board meetings and vacation. It has become a bit of a tradition in our family to spend some time in europe every summer. Last summer we spent close to six weeks in europe in four countries. This summer it will be only one week in two countries.

USV now has a significant european portfolio. We have five companies in our portfolio that were started in europe and another four or five with significant operations in europe. Seven of our portfolio companies have job openings in London right now (a total of 20 job openings). There are fifteen job openings in Berlin (all with our portfolio company SoundCloud).

I've written about the Internet startup sector in Europe a fair bit. I'm bullish on the Internet startup sector all over the world but Europe is closer to NYC than most of the rest of the world, both in terms of how long it takes to get there and also in terms of culture, language, and a host of other things that matter in the relationship between entrepreneur and investor.

We don't have an office in Europe and we can't be on top of everything that is happening there. We are more reactive in our European investments than proactive. SoundCloud is a good example. I first met the team at LeWeb in 2008. We missed on the first VC round and didn't get involved until after we'd met with the team three or four times over a couple years.

Europe will likely never be a larger percentage of our portfolio than it is now (between 10-15% by names and dollars). But it is a place where interesting companies are getting started. And I'm eager to get over there and take the pulse of things.

I'll be blogging as usual. It might be lighter than usual. We'll see.

The Easy Trade

I am on a flight from NYC to San Francisco. I paid for business class but I am sitting in the way back of coach, right next to the rest rooms. Why, you might ask, would I trade a business class seat for the very back of the bus?

Simple. The power outlets in business class aren't working and they are working fine in coach. My macbook's battery doesn't give me 6 hours of laptop time, so I need power to work the entire way from NYC to SF. With wifi on most of the flights from NYC to SF these days, working from coast to coast has become a key part of my routine.

I personally think power in every seat and wifi on every plane ought to be the law of the land, but I don't make the laws. I hope someone who is reading this does. And I hope United gets the power working in business class before my flight back to NYC.

Twelve Days In The Middle East

We are flying back to NYC today, we'll be in the air all day. I'm wishing we would have chosen to take the overnight flight last night and skipped the last dinner/evening in Tel Aviv, but that's not the call we made six months ago.

It has been a fantastic family trip. Here's the basic outline of what we did, courtesy of foursquare and google maps. If you click on that link, you'll get the details on all 57 checkins I did on this trip, in reverse chronological order.

The Gotham Gal has blogged the entire trip, twenty-two blogs posts in all, two and a half pages worth of blog posts full of pictures and descriptions.

Twelve days, breakfast to dinner every day, is a lot of face time with three young adults who value their time alone and independence. We had a few moments on this trip like we always do, but all in all we seem to have survived it.

We've been meaning to do this trip for years and I'm glad we finally did it. I suspect that all of our kids will be back in Tel Aviv soon enough. And the Gotham Gal and I are certain we will be back soon too. Given how much technology stuff is going in here, it's hard to ignore Israel as a center for technology innovation and venture capital investing. If only the flight was shorter and they had in air wifi. I'll be back on the grid in the new year.

Happy new year everyone.

Merry Christmas Everyone

I'm not gonna blog today. But Peter Kafka shared this video with his readers and I think I'll copy him and do the same. It's a sendup of the Bing Crosby/David Bowie classic. Enjoy.

Out Of Office Away Message

I just turned on my vacation message on gmail. The Gotham Gal and I are off to the middle east with our kids for the next week and a half.

I love blogging when I am on vacation. I get up earlier than everyone else in my family so it's a time when I can relax and put thoughts down on paper (or web page as it were).

So the posts will keep coming and I'm hoping I can do some deeper dives than I've been able to do recently. The Gotham Gal is the travel blogger in our family so if you are interested in what we are doing and where we are going, check out her blog starting Monday.

Some Thoughts On London On Our Way Home

We are heading back to NYC today. The Gotham Gal has been in Europe since July 4th. Our kids have been here for parts of that stay. I have been here for most of it with one trip back to the states in the middle of the month. The Gotham Gal has been travel/food blogging the entire trip and there is a treasure trove of advice on Rome, Tuscany, Zurich, London, and Normandy on her blog for those interested in visiting those places.

Our family rented an apartment in London and my daughter Emily did a program at Central Saint Martins the past month. The rest of us tagged along for parts of the trip.

I was able to get a fair bit of work done over here. I'd like to thank the people at Index Ventures who provided me an office, wifi, and a few lunches too. I enjoyed doing meetings at VC hangouts like The Wolesley and The Soho House. The Wolesley reminds me of Balthazar and I vastly prefer the London version of The Soho House to its NY cousin.

Speaking of cousins, London feels like NYC's cousin. The cities are very similar in many ways. The language, the culture, the nightlife are all close to each other. It's easy to live here if you live in NYC.

But there are some interesting differences. The most striking is the Middle Eastern, Russian, and Indian wealth that is resident in London these days. I was walking up Bond Street in Mayfair one afternoon by myself. I was walking faster than everyone else and passed at least a dozen groups in a four or five block span. And I noticed that hardly any of those groups were speaking english. When you walk into the most expensive stores, there aren't many brits or americans in them. But they are full of people from countries to the east of europe. It is a stark reminder of where the wealth is being created in the world today.

I believe the tech scene is alive and well in London and growing throughout much of Europe. I covered a bit of this in my post on Seedcamp. London feels like NYC did five years ago. There are a bunch of strong entrepreneurs and startups but the investment community is still pretty thin and there aren't enough active angels. Like NYC, London entrepreneurs are commonly recruiting engineering talent in less expensive locations and there are plenty of those places a few hours plane time from London.

Throughout our month in Europe, I was using Foursquare to checkin. Since we left NYC on July 4th, I've checked into 133 locations in five countries (including my trip back to the states). That's roughly four checkins per day. I have found that Foursquare is actively used in Europe. We found checkins and mayorships in almost every venue we visited. However, it is much easier to gain mayorships in Europe. I have no mayorships in the US right now but I have accumulated six while we've been in Europe.

I really love the ability to map my checkins that I blogged about a few weeks ago. Our apartment was in Mayfair but we traveled all around London while we were here. And yet, you can see that my checkins are very much centered around Mayfair and Soho.

 

We are excited to be going home. We've missed our apartment, our beach house, our friends, and most of all our dog Ollie. But we really enjoyed our time in London. I hope to be back soon.

A Day On The Normandy Beaches

I grew up in an army family, read a ton of military history books as a kid, and know the story of D-Day like the back of my hand. But in almost 50 years, I've never visited the beaches where US, British, and Canadian troops landed on June 6, 1944. Today we rectified that. I went with the Gotham Gal and our son Josh.

We started at the western edge of Omaha Beach at Pointe Du Hoc where Army Rangers climbed steep cliffs to take out german guns that could have caused havoc on both Omaha to the east and Utah to the west. Turns out that the guns weren't there but 5 miles away. Even so, those Rangers ended up seeing a lot of difficulty in the ensuing days. This is what the area above the cliffs looks like. You can still see the effects of the allied bombs that softened up the german defenses in the days before D-Day.

 

At Pointe Du Hoc, I got an interesting lesson in the differences between my generation and my son's generation. We walked off the path onto this open terrain and Josh said, "wow, they really nailed this in Call Of Duty." Turns out Josh has played this battle more times in Call Of Duty than I read about it in books as a kid. I found out today that he had learned a lot about D-Day playing video games. 

Next stop was Omaha Beach. The first thing you notice about Omaha Beach is how wide it is and how much territory the troops had to cross to get the safety of the sea wall and the bluffs.

After visiting Omaha Beach, we visited the American Military Cemetery where about 10,000 US troops are buried, many of whom died on D-Day or in the ensuing month long campaign to secure Normandy under Allied control. As my friend Dave told me when we were planning this trip, "the americans do military cemeteries really well." He's right. I've been to a fair number of them and they are always maintained immaculately and are very moving.

After that, we made our way to Arromanches, where the British built a port to bring all of the supplies and equipment ashore after the beaches were secured. It was an amazing engineering feat and the Musee Du Debarquement does a good job of explaining how it was done. Afterward, we sat on a deck and had lunch overlooking the remains of the steel barges that are still in the ocean. Amazing stuff.

 

We barely touched the amount of historic sites and museums that you could visit on the Normandy coast. We have friends who spent a whole week here visiting the sites and learning the history of this historic battle. But it was a great day. Here is a map of the places we stopped today courtesy of Foursquare and Google Maps.

 

One hundred and seventy-five thousand troops came ashore on June 6, 1944. About four thousand of them lost their lives and another six thousand were wounded or captured. Though those numbers are large in terms of lives lost and sacrifices made, it was a very successful effort. If you compare D-Day to Iwo Jima, for example, the losses were much less for an invasion force that was almost 2.5x larger.

Visiting the beaches is a very moving experience that reminds you of the costs our country and our allies incurred 65 years ago now. I am glad I finally got to visit the beaches. It has been a lifelong desire and I am glad I finally was able to do it.

Foursquare Google Maps Mashup

I'm doing a keynote presentation today at the Geo Loco Conference in San Francisco. In putting together the visuals for my talk, I wanted to show my Foursquare checkins from my recent trip to europe on google maps.

So a little googling around led me to this post which explains how to do it:

• Visit your foursquare feeds page. Right click the KML link and copy it to your clipboard (don’t download it).

• Visit Google Maps and paste the link you copied into the search box. Hit enter.

It is so simple and easy to do. Here is the visual that I wanted to create:

And you get a list of checkins that you can share via the google maps sharing features. Here's a list of all the checkins I did in Zurich, for example.

 

I would love to save these foursquare feeds in discrete chunks like this for future reference. Someone sends me an email saying "what did you do that was fun in Zurich?". I could simply send them this list of checkins. So simple, so easy, so useful. I love it.

International Wireless Roaming

My family has been in europe for the past couple weeks. And we've been trying to keep our data roaming costs down. The Gotham Gal and I have a sweet blackberry plan on T-Mobile that provides a really excellent international data roaming deal.

My two kids who are in europe with us both use iPhones and they turned off data roaming while we were in Rome and Zurich, except for Josh who turned it on to checkin to places on foursquare and then turned it off. Turns out that Foursquare checkins don't use up a lot of mobile data. Looks like about 140kb based on ATT Wireless' user dashboard.

Even so, he is running up against his 20mb of data that comes with his current international roaming plan.

And now that we are in London, I decided to figure out a better way. It's pretty easy to get an iPhone unlocked over here. There are stores all over Oxford Street that will do it very inexpensively. Then you can get a "pay as you go" plan from one of the mobile carriers here. We chose O2 which is a Telefonica owned carrier. They have a plan for 30 pounds that gives you unlimited data here in the UK, 500 text messages, preferred rates for international calls and texts and that all comes with 30 pounds worth of charges. Once you spend the 30 pounds, you can "top off" the account.

We set this up for my daughter yesterday and I am seriously considering setting it up for my son as well. The only slight drag is they now have a new phone number. Not a big deal for The Gotham Gal and me. We can simply add that new number to our address books. But it is a bigger bummer for their friends and family who don't know they have a new number.

I am going to look into setting up forwarding their calls on their US numbers. I have no idea how to set up forwarding for text messages, if that is even possible.

You might wonder if it is worth all of this effort. Well I have had a number of europe trips that resulted in $1000+ phone bills when I got back. And that was for a couple weeks. There is no way we are going to let that happen, particularly with kids who live on their mobile phones.

I figure 30 pounds should buy my kids at least a week of full tilt mobile roaming. Maybe they can go two weeks on that amount. In any case, even if we end up spending 100 pounds on each of our two kids who are here for a month, that is a lot less than $1000 that we could end up spending if we stuck with their ATT Wireless numbers.

This whole international roaming thing sure feels like a racket to me. We have affordable plans in the US. We can buy affordable plans in the UK. Why do we have to change numbers to make that happen? Why can't we simply buy the affordable plan in the UK via our US carrier and have it work for as long as we are in the UK?

I suspect that people who live here in europe and travel a lot between countries are way more experienced with this problem. I'm curious what they do to deal with this problem.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tips for Using Your Cellphone Abroad (bucks.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Avoid the shock of cellphone roaming charges (theglobeandmail.com)
• Browsing the web for $10,000 an hour (mobileopportunity.blogspot.com)