What would you do next if you sold your company to an Internet giant for millions of dollars? Existing examples show 4 different types of Internet millionaires:
Now let's look into each of these types and illustrate them with some famous examples.
As the old saying goes, lightning never strikes twice. For some entrepreneurs that saying doesn't hold water and they strike it rich time and again, but rarely with the same business. When Alex Tew came up with the seemingly silly idea to sell pixels for $1 each in 2005, most people thought he was nuts. But sure enough, a little over 4 months later Million Dollar Homepage had indeed racked up over $1 million in sales. A flood of copycat sites appeared, but most failed. Lightning didn't strike twice.
Undeterred, Tew launched his second venture, Pixelotto last December. The idea was basically the same with a slight change: pixels would cost $2, and half of the two million dollars the site expected to raise would be given to one lucky visitor (while 5% would go to a charity of the winners choice). Pixelotto got off to a good start, raising over $100,000 in the first few days, but sales have since basically stalled. The prize fund has only advanced $15,000 in the past six and a half months and it seems unlikely that Tew will reach his goal of a $1 million prize by year's end (the pot sits at $152,000 right now).
Summary: Life is becoming more digital and the digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.
I was reading a feature about Second Life on the plane and next to me was a man in
his late fifties, named John. As it turns out, like me John was a graduate of Lehigh
University. He was class of 1967, while I was 1994. He'd never heard about Second Life,
but when I explained to him the concept he had a good laugh and then asked: "So is this
for those who did not quite make it in the First Life?" No, I replied, this is quite
different - it's a whole new world. What happened next was probably even more surprising
than the fact that we went to the same school. John said to me:
One year ago, the new-look netscape.com launched. What was once the leading
portal in the 90's was re-born in June 2006 as a
digg clone. Soon after the re-launch, there was an enormous uproar from
the existing Netscape.com community - which, it turned out, were fairly 'old school'
about what kind of portal they liked. The posts that we ran at the time got a huge number
of comments - and overwhelmingly negative towards the re-design. Some even compared New Netscape to
New Coke.
So how has Netscape.com fared over the past year? Let's check that out...
German courts have confirmed that Google's fight for the G-mail trademark has been lost. 33-year old German businessman Daniel Giersch has won a case against Google, meaning that Google is not permitted to use the "Gmail" name in Germany. Giersch had registered 'G-mail' in 2000, four years before Google came out with its web mail service of the same name.
This is the second time that Google has had to give up the Gmail name - two years ago Google handed over the rights to the name in the UK. At that time Google changed the name to Google Mail, after its run-in with research firm Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) - which used the name G-mail to refer to a part of its financial analytics software.
Glubble is a very impressive browser plugin that adds parental controls to Firefox. Glubble transforms Firefox into a locked down environment where kids can only surf approved sites, while parents can easily log into a restriction-free account for normal web surfing.
Glubble also re-skins Firefox with a simple and appealing kid-friendly look while logged into a child account. The browser under Glubble is a completely controlled environment, meaning all of your bookmarks and most of your other plugins are hidden while logged into a child account (some plugins, like Flash for example, will still work -- a good thing considering how many children's sites utilize Flash).
MyLifeBrand is a new social networking convergence
service, currently in invitation-only alpha testing. This product aggregates Web 2.0
functionality, tools, creativity and a portal for converging business with user generated
content. The premise is to offer diverse services where individuals, groups and
businesses can take advantage of proximity and community. MyLifeBrand combines social
networking, common tools with social media and allows for the integration of networks
like Facebook, Bebo, Linkedin, MySpace and others. This startup dares users to
"“Take the Challenge”" and perhaps improve life, but can it catch Facebook
and others?
There is not a lot of information about MyLifeBrand's development team. Several blogs have done periphery stories about some of their promotions, but details are hard to come by. MyLifeBrand is apparently a Seattle-based company and their Founder and CEO Jeff Jani's name was mentioned in a press release via Business Wire on the 29th. The company has had several promotions, including one featuring a Kelly Clarkson community, a gamer community creation contest and a virtual town hall featuring Presidential hopeful Sen. Chris Dodd.
As it's halfway through 2007, let's take a look back on the highlights of the first half of the year. How is 2007 shaping up in terms of web technology trends and activity? Which companies have shined from January - June 2007?
Well so far in 2007, there are two Web companies that in our opinion have really stood out - Google and Facebook. Google has been furiously buying companies and refining its product range this year, while Facebook has broken through in 2007 as a BigCo and is now a true threat to other big companies like Yahoo and Fox/MySpace.
Google has been on an acquisition romp
since at least October 2006, when they acquired YouTube
for $1.65B and wiki company
JotSpot at the end of that month. Since that time, Google has not only kept acquiring
companies at a rapid rate - but they've become the trailblazer for other companies to
follow. Google's $3.1B
acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick was quickly followed by similar
acquisitions from rival companies (notably Microsoft's $6B
purchase of aQuantive). Other significant acqusitions by Google this year include Feedburner,
Zenter (an
online presentations company), and just recently GrandCentral.
During the weekend we asked for feedback from readers and startups alike, about how your favorite web apps perform on the iPhone. The early feedback mostly reported issues with AT&T getting the service up and running - e.g. Orlando commented that he bought the iphone on Friday at 7:00 pm, but "till now AT&T has not activated the phone."
It's a few days later and we're starting to get more stories about how web apps perform on the iPhone. Qipit, an online service that allows you to copy, fax, email and publish documents, confirmed that their app is compatible with the iPhone. And another report came through this morning from Meebo, the browser-based IM platform. Their report (via email to R/WW):
Yesterday Richard opined that Digg could use some editors so that if someone submits a story with a nonsensical description or lame title it could be fixed instead of seeing a good story get buried. Thoof, which is a new link sharing and social news site, allows anyone to do just that: edit link titles and descriptions (or add new tags).
Thoof is a very new site, having only come out of a two week private beta at the end of June. Techcrunch reviewed it in mid-June. The site was founded by a handful of former Revver employees, including co-founder Ian Clarke, and the man behind the Apache Wicket web framework upon which Thoof is built.
