Notion has just completed an investment in Shutl – you can read the full press release here. I wanted to write about why we made this investment and why we think the business has a very bright future.

In a nutshell, Shutl enables ecommerce companies to offer immediate or one-hour window deliveries to their customers through a network of local point-to-point couriers. Ecommerce has historically utilised the hub-and-spoke delivery model making it virtually impossible to offer such an immediate or precise service. The ecommerce market has been innovating non-stop for more than fifteen years now and yet there has really been little meaningful innovation in delivery. The result has been widespread consumer dissatisfaction which loses retailers sales.

Shutl’s service represents real innovation, Their technology integrates with local courier companies and identifies available capacity to provide ecommerce customers in real time with a same day delivery time and cost. The service has delivered products in as little as 15 minutes! Customers can actually see their products winging their way towards them using GPS and they can then rate the service such that the best couriers will be more likely to be selected the next time. Like all the best propositions it’s really that simple but it has taken a great deal of R&D to deliver the kind of seamless experience that brand’s would want for their customers.

The global ecommerce market is around $500bn today and is expected to reach $1tr by 2016. This is clearly a massive market and it seems very likely that a good percentage of these customers would select a more immediate, flexible and precise delivery service if given the choice.

Tom Allason, Shutl’s founder and CEO, is probably the reason I was drawn to the opportunity in the first place. Tom has already had an exit in the courier market and knows the industry inside out. But more importantly, Tom has a really clear and compelling vision for Shutl and you just know he is not going to stop until he gets there. Tom is also building a really strong team around him and you can tell just by looking the piles of CV’s on his desk the importance he places on finding great people.

There were two pieces in the Wall Street Journal last week on the subject of the US venture capital market losing momentum. First there was a piece about the widening gap between capital being invested and capital being raised.

And hot on the heels of this there was a piece about a possible ‘cash crunch’ saying that some of the momentum had come out of the market, that some start-ups were struggling to raise money and valuations were starting to come down.

I think the US market is cooling off a little and see this as a healthy and inevitable phase for it to go through.  Over the last few years the megatrends of cloud computing, social and mobile have jet-propelled the start-up scene and as a result more and more exciting companies have emerged that seemed to have the potential to really disrupt their industries. The trailblazers for this new generation are companies like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter,  Groupon, LinkedIn, Dropbox and Skype.

However, as sure as night follows day, a heated market will always be followed by an over-heated market. You know you’re in an over-heated market when valuations get so high it’s difficult to work out how they were calculated, more and copycat companies emerge and all start-up related costs go through the roof such as office space and salaries.

At the end of the day even an exciting and fast-growing market is ultimately finite – we only have a certain amount of money to spend. In all the excitement people sometimes forget this.

So things are cooling off a little but I see this as a natural correction in the cycle and I don’t expect there to be a dramatic fall in valuations and confidence – as I’ve said before I really don’t believe this is like the bubble of 2001. This new generation of companies are leveraging the three megatrends of mobile, social and cloud computing that are completely reshaping the technology landscape – and the largest ones are so much more mature with much more substantial revenues than was the case ten years ago.

Guest columnist Jos White identifies one of European technology’s sweet spots

This is a guest column in the Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 debate series. The Start-Up 100 is supported by Orrick, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft BizSpark.

One of the biggest shifts in the last year or so – and something we’ll undoubtedly see more of in 2011 and beyond – is the rise of mobile internet. If CES is anything to go by, smartphones and tablet devices are going to continue sweeping across the market at a terrific pace: starting with consumers, but soon reaching into business, education and government. This huge growth in the market will be further accelerated in 2011 by smartphone prices coming down significantly, by ever-improving mobile networks and by increasingly ubiquitous and free WiFi networks. Research suggest smartphones sales will exceed half a billion during that year, overtaking PC sales for the first time.

European companies have some big advantages over their American counterparts because of the natural head start they have had. Mobile adoption came much faster and much more rapidly in Europe, spurred on in part by the innovations enabled by GSM networks that weren’t available in the US. As a result, our mobile market has matured faster than America’s has. There’s a whole generation of consumers coming through who expect their first point of contact to be through a mobile device.

Europe is producing some very strong online services – think Groupspaces, Huddle, Spotify, Skype, Tradeshift and LOVEFILM – that have a large and growing user base. The next step for them is to truly unlock the power of their service across mobile platforms. The question these companies need to be asking themselves now is not ‘when can we do this?’, but ‘how quickly can we do this and how can we make it an even better experience than it is on a PC?’ That will be of the key challenges that defines 2011 for almost every web-based business.

The businesses that get ahead will be those that take full advantage of mobile, delivering a quality service that exploits the unique characteristics of the platform, in a way that consumers really love – rather than providing something people can put up with until they get back to a PC.