I Have No Idea What’s Going On

Website Watch – 9/20/07
The following pages are remarkable because they either offer a service that I predict will be successful or demonstrate a unique model.

Interesting note:  Dow Jones VentureOne reports that during the first half of 2007, venture capitalists put $464 million into 101 Web 2.0 deals.  This is up from 89 deals involving $432 million during the first half of 2006.  For the first time, New England beat the Bay Area in terms of funds given, $102 million versus $90 million.  Europe’s investments doubled during the first half of this year to $51.5 million.  Including cash from other VC hotspots such as China and Israel, total investment from outside the US grew by 60 percent to $107 million.

Powerset (www.powerset.com) San Francisco startup, Powerset, is charging into the search engine arena telling the crowd that Google has plateaued.  The technology that they’re licensing from the Palo Alto Research center (PARC) has been tried before, and failed.  Ask Jeeves was the first popular plain English language search engine that brought users results based on a simple sentence, not keywords.  Powerset is testing it’s technology on a selected 16,000 users but so far their searches are restricted to Wikipedia.  Users then vote on weather a Google query returned better results or if they were outdone by Powerset.  Theoretically, users will be able to get better results by typing more precise search requests.  Should this technology prove  accurate, Google will need to shift gears to keep up.

SpirlFrog (www.spiralfrog.com) This iTunes competitor is completely free.  Registration requires an e-mail address, name, dob, and zip code.  The site aims to let users download tunes to their personal computers with the click of a mouse.  With profits from advertising, SpiralFrog estimates it will need 10 million users each month to pay for its record licensing.  I believe this site will meet with some failure.  Set for launch next Monday, the site so far has only 770,000 songs compared to iTunes’ 6 million.  Furthermore, Mac users can’t get the service and Mozilla users must either change browsers or download Windows Media Player plug-ins.  The niche between Pandora and iTunes’ services is not a large one, nor one that, without a competitive number of archived songs, will be very popular.  It is a niche nonetheless so only time will tell.

Bazaar Voice, Inc. (www.bazaarvoice.com) This startup is based on promoting e-commerce.  They have a number of services aimed at shoppers.  One feature gives consumers the tools to ask other consumers questions about products they might buy.  While many vendor sites have places for customers to review a product, Bazaar Voice is the first to offer the “ask and answer” service, which would enable one to pose a question and hope for an answer moments before a purchase.  They recently netted $8.8 million in VC funding.

Fon (www.fon.com) Founded by Martin Varsavsky in 2005, Spanish ingenuity shines through this internet startup.  Fon is as simple as it is useful.  First, Fon sells users a wireless router (about US $60). They hook it up, register their node, and agree to share their connection with other “Foneros”. Any users who want to charge outsiders for access can do so, and Fon gets a cut.  Using a neat feature involving Google Earth, users can pick out locations via satellite!  It’s as practical for tourists using their laptops as it is for business travelers trying to find a signal with their PDA.  With $21.7 million from Google and Skype among other investors, Fon plans on having over a million hot-spots by 2010.  With half a million users and over 70,000 hot-spots already, this shouldn’t be a problem.  In the near future, expect a few telecom provider partnerships.  One foreseeable snag is the fact that cities, such as San Francisco, are beginning to explore the possibility city-wide WiFi.

Loopt (www.loopt.com) Palo Alto-based Loopt is a play on the social networking fad.  CEO and founder, Sam Altman, turned one’s mobile phone into a 24/7 friend-tracker (through their application software) and allows you to view friends’ locations on a Google-looking map.  Reciprocally, friends can see your profile picture above your geographic location.  You can also get alerts when friends are nearby and send “proximity” messages back and forth.  Their hook is a profile that members create and can manipulate through their cell phones.  Event locations can also be tagged and sent out to all, some, or just one friend.  Users at home can view the same information on their desktops.  One catch is that only certain phones will support this activity.  However, the target demographic is likely to already have the upgraded phones anyway.  In their Series A round of funding, Loopt secured $8 million.  In Series B, Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates dished out $12 million.  The service is free for the time being but in January, users will be charged a $2.99 monthly fee.  Competition as of yet remains the text message-based, Google-owned, Dodgeball – a far less smooth experience.

Soonr (www.soonr.com) This September 2006 product connects users with their PCs at home.  Pictures, data files, sound bytes; all can be accessed and optimized for use on your mobile phone.  Soonr even provides users with a desktop search capability.  Of course the real-time practicality of a service like this would be to access office files left at home, at work.  For teens or students, the pictures alone would make this service desirable.  Series A negotiations landed Soonr $6 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and private investors.  Soonr has approximately 250,000 users and partnerships with WebEx and Swisscom.

Website Watch – 9/6/07
Of this weeks internet startups, the following caught my attention as having potential or an already established success, in which case I summed interesting events.  This commentary is meant to shed some light upon the ever-growing world of internet business as seen through my eyes and provide a porthole into the opportunities I predict will meet with success.

PayPerPost (www.payperpost.com) This Orlando-based startup connects advertisers with product-bloggers for hire.  Ted Murphy, founder and CEO just collected $10 million in venture capitol despite very negative press.  First harassed for not disclosing the link between eager advertisers and paid bloggers, and later called evil for Murphy’s exemplary capitalistic site, many web startups would kill for as much publicity.  Blogs must be active for at least 90 days while advertisers choose whether the blog will be positive, negative, or neutral towards the product.  

Geni (www.geni.com) Geni attempts to bring the social networking craze to the genealogy world.  Geni boasts over five million profiles and promotes itself as the place to connect family.  Users enter their e-mail address and being adding family members to their tree.  Family can only view each others’ profiles by creating their own memberships.  As far as I can tell, the only way to view trees is via e-mail.  This site could easily triple its membership by adding this an application for other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Startup Schwag (www.startupschwag.com) Chicago based business is reminiscent of VallySchwag, an online company that gave subscribers a monthly package of startup stickers, t-shirts, cups, and other promotional items.  For $15 a month plus shipping, members receive a monthly package – thus far only containing a “startup t-shirt of the month”.  Though other items will likely follow, the original, ValleySchwag, failed because supply of these items could not meet the demand.  Rather than hounding startups for their schwag, this startup will purchase the licensing rights and make their own product.  Of this week’s sites, I believe this to be the most mercantile and thus the most risky.  I don’t see profits being anything more than a small-to-midsize trickle.

SayNow (www.saynow.com) SayNow allows members to send online voice messages to celebrities and allows the celebrities to reply to those who have subscribed to their fan community.   250 musician groups are testing the service – so far with very positive feedback.  Palo Alto based, SayNow has over 870,000 fans who no doubt helped secure $7.5 million in venture capitol they recently aquired.

Vino Match (www.vinomatch.com) Promoted as the site to help you to “Find the perfect wine for any occasion”, Vino Match helps users match food, occasions, navigate types, ratings, counties, and countries.  Most wines can be bought on the site but for those that can’t, a wish list can be compiled.  The site makes buying and matching wine easy even for the “Rossi sipper”.  As wineries continue to change their marketing methods and Parker/pricing indices, the American public especially is becoming somewhat wine-crazed.  If I had to guess at whether this fad will last or not I would say this: throughout the annals of religion, philosophy, and history, wine has remained timeless.

Website Watch:  8/27/07
The following pages are remarkable for one or more of a few reasons.  They show remarkable growth in recent weeks, offer a service that I predict will be successful, demonstrate a unique model, or offer incites into the uses people are finding for the World Wide Web.

Facebook (www.facebook.com) In a recent Newsweek article, Peter Thiel, board member of Facebook valued Facebook at more than $7 billion.  This comes after founder Mark Zuckerburg turned down a $1 billion offer by Yahoo.  Within the next year or so Facebook expects to announce the largest IPO since Google.  Facebook is also working quietly on an advertising system that would allow ad companies to target their ads based on information users reveal about themselves on their page.

Facebook Applications:
Where I’ve Been (www.whereivebeen.com)  A map feature that facebook, myspace, or other site hosts can add to their page and map where in the world they’ve traveled, lived, and where they want to go.  The firm of three is expanding rapidly and is searching for programming engineers.  They currently have 2.4 million users and are growing by about 20,000 unique users/week.

The Million Dollar Wiki (www.milliondollarwiki.com)  Using the “wiki model” a University of Connecticut student (19 years old) started a site on which users purchased wiki pages for life.  Page content can only be changed by the pages owner.  Everypage costs $100.  Pages can be resold to other users for a profit down the line.  His goal is to sell 10,000 pages, thus the name, million dollar wiki.  As of 8/28 he has sold 417 pages.

WikiPages (www.wikipages.com) Also using the wiki model, this page is a business directory.  In its early stages this page focused on New York City but now is expanding listings to other cities as well.  Similarly, (city name)wiki.com is growing in popularity as users can add events, restaurants, businesses, and add reviews for other users. (Example: www.daviswiki.org)

ShareNotes.com (www.sharenotes.com) We have yet to see the beta version of this site.  As of now, users can enter an e-mail address to be notified when the beta launch occurs, expected late 4th quarter of 2007.  When functional, site will allow users to share lecture notes from universities across the US.  It is unclear if they will require payment but it’s looking like it will be a free service.  Current marketability of the site looks high.

Click India (www.clickindia.com) This site is growing increasingly popular in India.  Given the ethnic/tribal division of the country this site allows users from villages/clans nation-wide to congregate on an online message board/community classified site.  Users can make announcements, sell items, search for jobs, etc, all on one site.  Think craigslist + newspaper classifieds + monster + eHarmony + rent.com.

NextWebStudios (www.nextwebstudios.com) Embedding video on web pages is growing rapidly.  This company shoots greenscreen for businesses/web developers and embeds high-quality video on their sites.  Rationale: viewing video on a company’s page exponentially increases amount of time spent on that particular site.

Club Penguin (www.clubpenguin.com)  Inspired by the success of other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, Club Penguin targets younger children.  The site offers games, kid-friendly chat, and even an online store.  This month, Walt Disney Co. paid $350 million for the site.