BT span O2 out of BT in 2001. O2, now owned by Telefonica after an all cash £17.7 billion acquisition in 2006 now has 21 million mobile customers compared to BT’s 19.4 million land line customers. It continues to grow and has added 1,000,000 subscribers in 2009  thanks largely to its exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in the UK. During this time, Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile and 3 added a combined total of 400,00o subscribers. Will this growth continue? It seems unlikely given Orange started selling the iPhone this Tuesday and sold 30,000 contracts on the first day.

Or some of them anyway…

Our CEO Tales drinks networking event on the evening of December 3rd, features leaders from three of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies who will, in amongst the networking between VC and PE investors and growth company CEOs, provide a thought provoking perspective on growth.

Five minute talks from Ben Drury (7Digital), Kieron Smith (The Book Depository) and Jay Bregman (eCourier) will address the question, “Why has the recession been good for us?”

We don’t like negative thinking at The BLN and try to think about life positively. The combined revenue of these three businesses, (over £70 million), and the fact that they are all less than 6 years old, gives them some authority when it comes to speaking about the positive aspects of a recession. Together, these businesses has experienced over 2,500% growth over the past four years.

Here is a little more about the speakers and their companies.

Kieron Smith, The Book Depository

The Book Depository is the UK’s largest dedicated online bookseller. Founded in 2004 to make ‘All Books To All’ they focus on selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’, differentiating itself from other retailers who increasingly focus on bestsellers. Having forged unique publisher and supplier relationships, they have the ability to dispatch over 2.3 million titles within 48 hours, with free worldwide delivery, enabling customers to find the books they want. As the world’s fastest growing bookseller, The Book Depository saw the last 12 months’ sales topping £62m, dispatching over 100,000 parcels a week worldwide.

Kieron Smith is Managing Director of The Book Depository, the second largest online bookseller in the UK, and the fastest growing bookseller in the world. He has worked in the book trade for over twelve years, starting out with WHSmith, setting up Ottakars.co.uk in 1999, heading up the web offering at BCA and operations at Methven’s, with a three year stint outside the industry as Head of Online at Europe’s leading video games web site GAME.co.uk. He returned to bookselling as Head of Online operations at Waterstones.com and then as Managing Director of innovative start-up BookRabbit, before joining The Book Depository as MD in July 2008.

Jay Bregman, eCourier

eCourier.co.uk is a technology-enabled service provider. We provide ASAP on-demand same day courier services empowered by a technology platform which brings together mobile computing, location based services, a Web 2.0 application, an a real-time optimisation algorithm we call ‘Larry’ which assigns orders to couriers and determines routes in real-time, balancing client happiness, courier happiness, and fleet efficiency. Our systems solve a fundamental problem in the same day market which hasn’t changed much since the 1970s–human dispatchers issuing work to couriers via radio provides low efficiency, high overheads, and diseconomies of scale.

Jay Bregman is the Founder & CTO of eCourier.co.uk, the online courier company with the purple vans. Jay turned a personal frustration with same day couriers into a £6m business in four years, recently ranked 53 on the Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 and 6 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 rankings of the fastest-growing and most innovative technology companies in the country. In 2007, eCourier was chosen as London’s Most Inspirational Business by the Evening Standard. Prior to starting eCourier, Jay worked at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Jay holds an MSc in Media and Communications Regulation & Policy from the LSE and a BA with honours from Dartmouth College in Philosophy. In 2009 Jay was named an ‘Enterprising Young Brit’ by Make Your Mark, despite hailing from New York City.

Ben Drury, 7Digital

7Digital taps into the burgeoning demand for digital media, 7digital operates services that bring together suppliers and consumers of digital media. 7digital is backed by Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe) – one of Europe’s leading technology venture capital firms and in January 2008 7digital raised £4.25m in its series B investor round from Balderton and Sutton Place, the investment vehicle of Mark Getty – founder of Getty Images. In September 2008 7digital.com was the first company in Europe to launch DRM-free MP3 downloads with all four major record labels. As of October 2008, 7digital employs 45 people in London and Cologne and has over 1.7 million registered customers. 7digital. HMV took a 50% stake in 7 digital in September 2009.

Ben Drury began his career in 1996 as a founder of dotmusic.com, an internal venture at United News and Media. Dotmusic quickly became a leading online music destination attracting over 1.8m unique users per month (in 1999). In 2000 Ben was headhunted by BT Group to head up the broadband music efforts at their ISP BT Openworld. As Head of Music at BT, Ben successfully launched a major music channel before leading the acquisition of his old company dotmusic in 2002. At BT, Ben pioneered music and video downloads on dotmusic with the UK’s first unlimited subscription offer. Following the partnership between BT and Yahoo! to form BT Yahoo! in 2003, Ben engineered the sale of dotmusic to Yahoo! for approx. £3.3m. Ben then founded 7digital with James Kane in 2004 with the vision of creating a digital media marketplace. Ben was named by Growing Business magazine as a Young Gun 2006 – the award for leading entrepreneurs under 35 and in 2007, 7digital was awarded the prestigious Red Herring award Top 100 Europe Award as one of the most promising technology companies in Europe. In 2008, Ben was a finalist in Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year awards. Ben graduated from King’s College London with BSc (Hons) Physics with Philosophy of Science. Ben is also the Deputy Chairman and Director of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) and is a board director the Official UK Charts Company.

To apply for a place at this event, come and find out more here.

I went to see Accel last week. I mentioned this to a friend in another top 10 fund that evening when I met in a pub.

“Struggling at the moment. Really need some exits as they have a lot of money deployed.”

The world of venture capital seems filled with such knowing commentaries as relatively opaque funds jostle with one another to be number one without any real data to measure their relative succeses. And then Accel exit from Admob ($750 million to Google) and PlayFish (up to $400 million to EA). And now Accel are doing great. And that same nameless commentator was one of the first to congratulate them. Funny old world.

On a separate note, congratulations to all at Admob and Playfish. We have had the pleasure of hosting both Kristian Segerstrale and Russell Buckley at BLN events in the past year and they are both extraordinarily inspirational people.

On a personal note, I have known Russell for quite a few years now and I am so delighted for him. He is living proof that you don’t have to be a nasty, conniving, backstabbing mother f to be successful. He is one of the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful guys around. This really could not have happened to a nicer person. Congratulations.

Given the unfortunate press that Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga has been getting in the US, it is not very surprising that he will not be coming over the the UK as part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK trip later in November.

Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it was launched but stories and by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch amongst others has exposed some of the curious (and dubious) practices that have been employed to get there.

Mark Pincus, CEO & Founder, Zynga

You can read more about the back story here, here and here.

Whilst I am sorry that one of Silicon Valley’s more colourful characters will not be joining us, I am sure he has a few issues to deal with on the domestic front. I think there is a lot that can be learnt from such an interesting tale.

Maybe we should get him to lead a discussion on business ethics? I can imagine he is learning a lot at the moment.

There is still an amazing line up for the Silicon Valley comes to Camriddge events:

Here is the list of the currently confirmed SVC2C participants:*

• Allen Morgan, Mayfield Fund, Managing Director
• Biz Stone, Twitter, Co-Founder
• Blake Krikorian, Sling Media, Founder
• Bob Cart, Greenvolts, Founder
• Brett Bullington, Angel Investor
• Caterina Fake, Flickr, Founder
• Hans Peter Brondmo, Plum, Founder
• Hugo Barra, Google Mobile, Group Product Manager
• James Rosenthal, Google, Strategic Partnerships
• Jeff Saperstein, Author, Writer
• Jigar Shah, Carbon War Room, CEO
• Julie Hanna Faris, Kiva, Chair of the Board
• Limvirak Chea, Google, New Business Development
• Mark Mitchell, Serious Materials, COO
• Nick Heller, Google, Strategic Partnerships
• Peter Thiel, PayPal, Founder, Investor
• Premal Shah, Kiva, Founder
• Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn, Founder, Exec Chairman
• Rob Jonas, Google, Director of Strategic Partnerships
• Robert Swerling, Google, New Business Development
• Salar Kamangar, Google, Adwords Inventor
• Ted Shelton, The Conversation Group, Partner
• Toby Prehn, G2 Energy, Founder, Investor
• Marc Tarpenning, Tesla, Founder

* Obviously, whilst these individuals are currently confirmed to attend the programme, we cannot guarantee the attendance of any individual due to circustances beyond our control.

Word is that Rupert Murdoch is to block searches via Google and other search engines. “Madness!”, some will say whilst others will be watching with great interest. Publishers, ecommerce and many others that rely on the Internet have long been very uncomfortable with the power that Google wields over them. While Google helps them get found, if they don’t play, and pay, by the rules, they disappear. Google is constantly launching new initiatives to help consumers like Commerce Search that leave other businesses decidedly uneasy. Put simply and directly, many businesses would like to do without Google but don’t feel they can. I am not sure Murdoch can, but it will be interesting to see him have a go.

Looking forward to our ecommerce discussion dinner next week.

With founders, CEOs or ecommerce heads from the following companies, looks like we might have an entertaining discussion: Amadeus Capital, Arcadia Group, Aroxo, Astley Clarke, Balderton Capital, Brown Rudnick, Burton, Calibre One, Cognitive Match, Deloitte, eBay UK, eCommera, Eden Ventures, Far-Fetch.com, House of Fraser, I Want One of Those, Isabella Oliver, MedicAnimal, mydeco, NESTA, Piper Private Equity, Skimbit, Spreadshirt, Tesco.com, The BLN, Waitrose & Whatafind.

Success for ecommerce CEOs in next 18 months. www.wordle.net

Biggest concerns of ecommerce CEOs over next 18 months. www.wordle.net

Google launched Commerce Search yesterday:

“Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute. E-store administrators can highlight special products or connect related ones so searching is easier for their customers. Google Commerce Search includes a built-in spellchecker and synonyms so if visitors can’t remember exactly how to spell the particular toy or perfume or anything else they’re hunting for, Google Commerce Search will make some suggestions.” Official Google Blog.

So what is the catch? In some ways there isn’t one for consumers who will probably be able to find and buy more stuff, more easily. For retailers though, I am already hearing a lot of retailers who are uncomfortable with the power that Google holds over them. Stories abound of organisations competing against each other for adwords, and key words – especially brand words that mean more and more of an organisation’s marketing spend is going to do nothing other than fill Google’s coffers. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – it is basic capitalism.

It was interesting to hear at a recent ecommerce discussion that we organised though that many of the 20 or so organisations represented, (with over £1billion of annual sales) , expressed significant unease about the ‘Power of Google’. There is a very real fear that Google effectively has so much power at the moment that it is a monopoly that can dictate terms of business. Everyone in the group were very clear that the single thing they saw as being most helpful for ecommerce, was to have a credible competitor to Google.

It is not just Microsoft that has a lot to potentially lose in the search engine war. Online retailers will be disappointed by this news:

“Bing’s market share has stabilised after falling since mid August,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “However, a worrying trend for Microsoft is that the combined Bing and Yahoo! market share has seen a steady decline from 20.36% in July to 17.77% in October.” More.

Thanks @raimesh for this follow up to the post about what starting a business feels like. Too good not to post.

I guess this just goes to show that something fell apart faster than Lehman Brothers this year.