1000 Flowers Bloom

Ok maybe it is a bubble...

I thought that this company reviewed by Duncan Riley on TechCrunch was a joke but evidently not...

From the Digital Telepathy website:

"The Design Products take you from concept to fully-functional online business in only 90 days."

"You bring the great idea and give us a few weeks of your time. We'll bring our veteran team and our proven process. We'll then head into the kitchen and mix up a "Biz In A Box" that'll be ripe for the market."

The most bizarre thing is that Duncan (who should know better) makes the following statement:

Prices range from $15,000 through to $250,000, although each project is calculated on a per startup basis. It may sound like a lot of money, but it’s a lot of service for your buck, and it is competitive.

It seems a little ludicrous to me that some company is going to go figure out your business model for you if only you have a great idea. If it only was so easy to have a "Biz in a Box"!

Why $240 Million could have been a deal for Microsoft

Ok so everyone knows about the news that Microsoft paid $240 M for 1.6%  of Facebook. Terrence Russel at Wired thinks it was a good deal and I do too but for different reasons.
 

I did a little checking on Google Finance and there's something interesting that happens. Once the Microsoft / Facebook rumor gets out and is judged to be serious the stock jumps 1%. It then jumps another 1% in after hours trading when the announcement is confirmed. On a market cap of about $290B that means that MSFT was valued at an additional $ 6B after the deal.

I'll admit I'm not an expert on the market but it sounds like turning $240M into $6B is a good move.

Radar Networks coming out of Stealth

My friend Nova Spivak's company Radar Networks is coming out of stealth mode! They are launching Twine.com which is a consumer facing semantic web site.

I'm very curious to actually get to play with it as I've heard about it for a while now but he's been keeping the details very secret.

Some more details by Martin LaMonica, Nick Carr, Download Squad, Wired and ZDnet.

Skipping Web 2.0 This Year

I won't be at the Web 2.0 Conference Summit this year.

It's not because there's a bubble on as the NY Times thinks or because the Web 2.0 phenomena has jumped the shark as Om Malik suggests or even because my friend Nova is now calling for Web 3.0.

The main reason I'm skipping it this year is because I'm busy. Really really busy.

It's hard for me to justify 2 days to go to a conference to hang out with friends and have interesting conversations.

Not as hard for me to justify going out drinking and hang out with people AFTER the conference though!

Bubbleshare gets Acquired

Congratulations to Albert Lai and the team at Bubbleshare for the acquisition by Kaboose.

I met Albert last year when he was looking at the different options he had around raising money to keep the business going and I'm happy to hear that he found one.

Web 2.0 Wager Revisited - Stewart Butterfield goes double or nothing

Stewart Butterfield (one of the Flickr Founders) and I met at last year's Web 2.0 conference and we made a wager.

The gist of the wager was that Stewart thought Web  2.0 as a term was a fad and that by 2006 we'd be calling it something else. I believed that it would be bigger and better than ever this year. Ethan Stock documented it on his blog.

Now to be honest I hadn't thought much about this wager since I've been a little busy with my company.

By chance I happened to run into Stewart again in the restroom at Web 2.0 conference. (I guess this means there really is an Old Boys club). I re-introduced myself and wondered if he remembered our little bet. Luckily (for me) he did and handed me a $20 bill.

We got to talking a little and he thinks that he was just off by a year and that next year will be the year that the name of the conference changes. I think that he's still wrong about that and told him so. Stewart then agreed to a $50 bet on 2007.

I'm looking forward to running into him again at next year's conference and seeing who's right!

Web 2.0 - Collective Intelligence

I was really looking forward to the Collective Intelligence panel session today at Web 2.0 but most of the time I was disappointed. Collective Intelligence to me means using the wisdom of crowds to help make decisions and find information.

Somehow Collective Intelligence ended up being equated to User Generated Content which I think is a big mistake.

So we saw from Owen Van Natta from Facebook, Richard Rosenblatt from Myspace, Toni Schneider from Automattic and Jim Buckmaster from Craigslist. The things they talked about were interesting from a startup perspective but ultimately a lot of the advice boiled down to stay close to your users.

I'm glad that someone asked a question around combining the intelligence of users vs user generated content. A good example that Toni Schneider brought up was how their users help each other fight spam and how Craigslist lets users flag content.

Besides Aggregate Knowledge, I think that DIgg is a terrific example of a site that harnesses Collective Intelligence.

Web 2.0 Launchpad - Timebridge

Timebridge iets you better schedule other people.

It's got a cool way of letting you do conflict management and doing tentative meetings.

I'm glad that it integrates well with Outlook but this really seems like it's a feature rather than a whole company.

Web 2.0 Launchpad - Venyo

Venyo is a universal reputation management tool.

The problem is that they need massive buy in from partners in order to hit scale and become useful. I think that it will be cool if they can do it but I'm skeptical that they can.

Web 2.0 Launchpad - Odesk

Odesk lets you hire and manage technology contractors. You don't pay to post your job but they take a small fee on the amount you pay. Interestingly they test folks and provide the scores to help certify folks. You can also see their Odesk work history which is pretty interesting.

They also have something called a teamroom that lets you collaborate with them, bug tracking etc. In a nice twist they show you a screenshot of your developer every 6 minutes so that you can make sure they're really working! Scary!