WebProWorld
Having the title Ex-Googler is probably a good thing if you’re in the startup business. Twitter, after all, is run by ex-Googlers. That credibility worked the old hype machine for Cuil, too, until it couldn’t perform. Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, ex-Googlers, suggest it’s a bad idea to take on Google where Google is strong—like Cuil did with search—but taking it to Google where it is weak can work.
And so they’ve fairly quietly launched Likaholix in private beta.
PodTech.net had a lot of buzz around it primarily because blogger Robert Scoble left the sturdy walls of Microsoft to be a part of it. There were others with nice pedigrees, too, and $7.5 million in VC funding spelled sure success. It must not have spelled it in English, though. This week, PodTech sold to ViewPartner, a company that doesn’t even seem to have a website, for under $500,000, or enough to purchase a one-bedroom condo in San Francisco.
The founders of a new startup called Wigix are calling eBay old school, and don’t hesitate to target boycotting sellers incensed by recently imposed eBay seller fees. The name is short for WantItGotIt Exchange, and is modeled after the stock market rather than the competitive bid auction model.
I’m going to be giving the keynote presentation at an upcoming event organized by and focused on student entrepreneurs being held on the MIT campus this Saturday (May 3, 2008) from 12:00 – 4:00 p.m.. Student entrepreneurs from MIT, Harvard, Babson, Olin and Boston University and other Boston area academic institutions will gather to talk about startups. I could not hope for a better group to interact with.
One person took a few hours and about a hundred dollars to build a credibly effective music search engine, and why that experience demonstrated how addressing problems will be a better use of time than building the next Google.
I’ve been reading startup blogs for as long as there have been startup blogs.
I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky. I’m impressed with his wit and humor. Some of his older stuff was really good, but most of his newer stuff just hasn’t struck me in the same way. But, maybe that’s just me.
I’m a fan of Paul Graham. I’m impressed with his intelligence and ability to really cover a topic well in a way that makes sense and appeals to my analytical side.
I’m still trying to recover from the incredible two days that was the mesh conference, and will be posting updates and links to video, blogs, photos and reviews as I come across them, but in the meantime here’s a cross-post from my Globe and Mail blog in which I try to catch up with two of the many tech deals that occurred while I was en-meshed:
Salesforce launched an incubator for startups. It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program. A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it.
Before we get too deep into this, let me clarify two things. When I say without a “plan”, I mean without a formally written business plan – not that you should be clueless about what you want to do. And, when I say startup funding, I’m talking more about early stage seed funding via angels (though most of these tips should apply to VCs as well).
