There are many ways to raise money for a start up. Some people sell equity. Some people max out credit cards. Some people get a bank loan, some hit up family members, or dip into their savings, or take out a second mortgage on their house. Those are all things some people do to raise money. Then there's Stan Oleynick. He's selling his name.
The 23-year-old web developer from Sacramento, California is working on an unannounced project, and to raise money (he's hoping for a quarter million dollars), Stan is selling the rights to his name on his site Hold My Record. But it doesn't end there. Stan also has a plan to get the winner of his naming rights maximum exposure.
At the beginning of this month, Andrew Pipes wrote about Yahoo! Buzz and Google Trends, two search engine zeitgeist tools that attempt to show what topics are popular based on search volume. The idea is that when you look at search data over time you begin to get a picture of how topics trend, and when you mash that data up with data about news mentions, you end up with with a picture of what's important to people, when, and why.
Another site that could provide a window into what people are thinking about, is Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia deals with such a wide array of topics and is kept so meticulously up to date, it would follow that things people are reading about the most are probably the most important topics in a given time period. Unfortunately, search and traffic data is unavailable on Wikipedia. Information about the number of edits made to article pages is available, however. With that in mind, web developer Craig Wood created Wikirage.
Earlier this week Bloglines launched a beta re-design, ending about two years of design stagnation for the once dominant browser-based RSS Reader. During my conversation with new Bloglines GM Eric Engleman, we touched on the impact of Google Reader on this market. Has Google Reader in fact usurped Bloglines as the number 1 browser-based RSS Reader (which would also probably make them the leading RSS Reader overall)? That seems to be the opinion of a lot of tech people - and certainly Google Reader is a favorite of many early adopter types.
But based on current Hitwise data that Read/WriteWeb has gotten hold of, in fact Bloglines is still the market leader.
Most bloggers Feedburner data shows that "Google Feedfetcher" is ahead of Bloglines. However that isn't a fair comparison, because Feedburner defines "Google Feedfetcher" as being both Google Reader and iGoogle (Google's start page product). So here is data from Hitwise, supplied to us by Bloglines, which compares Bloglines with Google Reader alone:
Jooce is a new Flash-based WebOS product from France, currently in private beta (we have invites at the bottom of this post). The primary use case for Jooce is for people who use cyber-cafes a lot, instead of or in addition to their own PCs or laptops. Jooce enables users to store, share and access their media and applications (such as email and IM) online. The company says that the 'cybercafe generation' is about 500 million people a day, so that is their target audience. Jooce has already received seed funding from Mangrove, initial investors in Skype.
Clever Tools is a new online project management and extranet application suite that is aiming for a Q1 2008 launch (and a beta of at least a few of the apps in the suite in October of this year). The full Clever Tools suite will include a project management application (that includes message boards, task management, and file sharing), an invoicing app, timesheets, a CRM application, bug tracking, and a whiteboard.
For now, the Clever Tools team has only completed significant work on the project management tool, which I am told is mostly done, and the timesheet tool. Clever Tools founder Jason Jennings told me that he is aiming to have the PM and timesheet tools in "beta condition" by October. I was given a demo of those two tools and a sneak peak at some of the things on the docket for the suite yesterday.
Would you want your search history shared with your friends? If a report from the Google Operating System is correct then Google thinks you do. According to the report, Google has created a Facebook App that lets you search Google from within Facebook, logs your search history, and shares it with friends via your mini-feed.
So far, however, I have not been able to get to Google's Facebook application, which has been plagued by errors all week. This has led some to wonder whether this is even an official Google application.
Despite grumbling from big-name artists and record labels around rampant P2P 'piracy', there's never been a better time to make money from creating music tracks of your own. There are dozens of useful websites - some completely free to use - that serve budding musicians and seasoned tourers alike. In this post we cherry-pick the best online tools at your disposal to make music, find an audience for it, and then make money from your efforts. (If you're a writer, now's the time to read Josh Catone's excellent Self-Publishing Tool Kit.)
Every struggling songster sometimes feels abandoned by their muse. If you're looking for tuneful inspiration, then you may need to consult a rhyming dictionary first. There are a few online, but Rhymezone's database returns not just single words that match your query, but entire phrases too. A quick search or two and I produced this gem:
Everybody knew that things were not going that well
at Technorati, but the recent announcement of
David Sifry stepping down as CEO took people by surprise. This was a sign of internal turmoil,
particularly because there was no single successor announced. The company that was once hailed as a one of the poster
children of the new web era, the company that inspired many other ideas and startups, has gotten into trouble.
There is nothing funny or ironic about the problems at Technorati. When a company like this hits the wall, all of us ought to pause and think. There was a great idea, there was a great team, there were faithful users. So what went wrong? Was it the pressure to monetize? Was it competitive pressure? Performance problems? We cannot know for sure.
CNET columnist Matt Asay asks, provocatively: "does Google own your content?". It's based on a post by ZDNet's Joshua Greenbaum, who picked up on some interesting language in the terms and conditions of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Here's the offending passage:
"Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion."
(emphasis ours)
While Asay implies that this means Google is staking a claim of ownership, it is clearly not doing that - Google's T&C states that copyright belongs to the content owner. Also note that the above passage only applies to content that is made public, so it's not relevant to your private documents.
Our poll this week asks: Which tool do you mostly use for word processing?. We've had a great response, with 837 unique votes so far. The results are very much in favor of desktop word processing tools, which is a little surprising considering the early adopter readership of Read/WriteWeb. Microsoft Word has 47% of the vote, followed by OpenOffice with 15%. Google Docs isn't too far behind OpenOffice, with 13%. But it looks like the Web Office still has some way to go before it is used as the primary form of office software. The results so far, in order:
1. Microsoft Word 47% (391 votes)
2. OpenOffice 15% (125 votes)
3. Google Docs 13% (105 votes)
4. A Text Editor (e.g. Notepad, Emacs) 7% (58 votes)
5. Zoho 6% (48 votes)
6. Another desktop word processor (please comment) 5% (42 votes)
7. ThinkFree 4% (37 votes)
8. Other tool (please comment) 2% (15 votes)
9. Another browser-based word processor (please comment) 1% (9 votes)
10. StarOffice (Sun) 0% (4 votes)
11. Zimbra 0% (3 votes)
