Start-up building on top of Firefox

ZDNet reports that a company called Round Two is building "a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience."

Views: 
Slashdot: "...they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox"
Round Two website - doesn't have any products yet, but they're sponsoring a number of Firefox extensions and add-ons.

My comment:  
This is a great example of using the Web as a platform for business. It's been said before that Open Source provides opportunities for new businesses to bundle OS products into user-friendly packages, along with providing support. This looks like such a play - and they'll add new products to the mix too.

Venture Capitalists Bullish

AP reports: "Venture capitalists ended 2004 on their most profitable run since the dot-com bust, continuing a gradual recovery that has coincided with the stock market's renewed interest in young companies."

My comment:  
If VCs are happy, then we're all happy :-) There don't seem to be as many IPOs these days though - start-ups are more interested in getting bought by a bigco. A sign of a more risk-averse Internet climate nowadays?

Volvo Sponsors MSN Spaces

According to the press release, Volvo partnered with Microsoft's blogging service "to reach users who are engaged in telling the stories of their lives, mirroring the "Volvo for life" brand campaign."

Views:
Andy Lark comments: "Maybe that's a reason not to use MSN Spaces - the fact you don't get to choose who is advertising in your personal space."
Steve Rubel sees "three distinct groups of blog advertisers forming".

My comment:  
MS and Volvo think these adverts on MSN Spaces will "add value to consumer's experience". Hmmmm. Well I guess it's better than all those pop-up ads we used to get in the Tripod days ;-)

Other Web 2.0 Links Today

The Aggregation Kool-Aid - points out that aggregation is only part of the solution; relevance/matching are the key problems to solve.

Is the Internet Under-Hyped? - sure, we can always use more exaggeration and overstatement...

Yahoo! News Adds Custom RSS Feeds - this was from last week, but I didn't mention it at the time. Yahoo one-ups Google News (which has email notifications, but it's not the same).

Google top home for blogs - Google's Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Xanga.com lead the blog authoring tool market. MSN is about to crash the party though, driving their fancy volvos no doubt.