Working on several great article leads, will be posting very soon. Thanks for visiting the site!

NBC's Today Show with Meredith Vieira interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. Couple of interesting facts:

• Mark did not want to confirm the rumor about Yahoo's offering of 1 Billion Dollars
• While Mark is the definite face behind Facebook, he does have a couple of friends that were with Facebook from the start
• Clinton, Romney and even Prince Harry are on Facebook
• Facebook plans to have over 50 million users by then end of 2007
• Meredith Vieira confirmed that she is in fact older then 25

See a complete interview here.

It is all over the news that many new startups are getting funded or acquired. You probably heard or already thinking that we are in some sort of Web 2.0 bubble, and it may be the time to begin "shorting" technology stocks. On the contrary to this opinion, Marc Andressen is very convincing in arguing that this is not the case. He points our that to fear of dwindling stocks is the only thing that is common between the cave man and underperforming portfolio managers and that there is a reason why there aren't too many IPO coming about. I share Marc's opinion that it is much easier to open a tech company these days, because of cheap hardware, widely available low-cost bandwidth and hungry programmers, driven by globalization. This gives todays startups a foothold to the ground, and VC's a great way to test out the waters before pedalling ashore.

Microsoft Surface, the new way of interacting with the touch screen interface. Amazingly simple and almost fun to use, quickly reminds of the futuristic movies like Deja Vu or Minority Report. Check out a quick demonstration with Walt Mossberg in the video below.

Friendster is the recent scapegoat for the biggest Dot Com flop since Pets.com. Jonathan Abrams, founder, is the one taking most of the blame. While Abrams' new project Socializr (Evite copycat) is gaining market share, his indisputably darkened reputation is the reason Harvard Business School uses him as a case study of how NOT to manage a tech company. Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003 to find its current market share diminish down from 1st to the 13th  among the social networking sites, and current evaluation to be around $3 million.

Interestingly  enough, Friendster was not the first failure for Abrams. After working as a software engineer for Netscape, Jonathan's first startup project was HotLinks, which ran out of money in 2001.

Read more in a great cover story on how too much success can lead to forgetting to solve most trivial problems of software, and having too many cooks in the kitchen can lead to a dysfunctional company - from Inc magazine right here.

Lets review the list of Silicon Valley top Rock Star personalities who really made it.


Kevin Rose (Digg)
Valued at around $60 million based on the August's BusinessWeek article. Prior to Digg Kevin worked on TechTV as a production assistant and held a small position on one of the shows.


Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us)
Yahoo $31 million in December 2005. Prior to Deliciuos Joshua worked for Morgan Stanley as a programmer.


Dennis Fong(Xfire)
MTV Networks $102 million in April 2006. Prior to Xfire Fong (aka Thresh, or "Michael Jordan of the video games") won several awards for his gaming skills in Red Alert and Quake.



Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Did not sell out to Yahoo for $600 million. Prior to Facebook Mark created several projects, including Synapse Media player (smart music player), Facemash.com  (HotorNot copycat)  and Wirehog (file sharing).



James Hong (Hot or Not)
Rumored to make a $10 million on advertisements on his site.


Max Levchin (PayPal)
eBay Inc. (EBAY ) for $1.5 billion. Currently working on Slide and involved with Yelp.

Online leads generation firm, TrafficStrategies.com is being acquired by LinkShare for an undisclosed amount. Traffic Strategies was a privately held company based out of Tampa, founded in 2001. This event marks Linkshare's first company purchase since its establishment.

BVPEF, or simply Baring Vostok Private Equity Fund has sold 20% stake in the leading Russian e-commerce store Ozon to Swiss venture capitalist firm Index Ventures.

Ozon, which is based out of Moscow and until recently sold books, audio, video and electronics is now expending house goods and sportswear.

Index Ventures (among other partners) is the firm behind the recent $45 million investment in Joost, a revolutionary internet TV service.

Phonetical similarities of Ozon and Amazon is not the only thing both sites have in common. Ozon is a leader in Russia's online shopping segment and its selection vastly outnumbers nearing competition. The hope is that one day, Ozon will become Russian Amazon.

Ozon's major competition are
Books.ru
Bolero.ru
and Labirint

It was the first appearance of Bill Gates and Steve together at the same conference. This was probably one of not many iconic moments of technology, as the two most prominent pioneers of technology gave their thoughts to our public ears. While both congratulated each other on technology, Bill and Steve did not agree on the hardware and software coupling future. Not to say this is surprising at all, as Macintosh was always about manufacturing their hard to their soft as a "uniproduct", while Microsoft was always made to run on as many hardware component variations as possible. Check out a nice article on Forbes for detailed quotations and more information.

CBS is paying 280 Million dollars for Last.fm. Last is claiming to revolutionize the music by mixing in the community rankings of its user base. Competing with sites like Pandora, iLike and others Last.fm is utilizing the benefits of the community to provide more precise song raitings and rankings along with additional user content. With 15 Million active members, CBS is paying approximately $18+ per user which looks like a decent deal if compared to Yahoo's $243 dollars per user for the Bebo deal.

"Last.fm is one of the most well-established, fastest-growing online community networks out there," said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief executive of CBS. "Last.fm adds a terrific interactive extension to all of our properties and also is a huge step in CBS Corporation's overall strategy of expanding our reach online to transition from a content company into an audience company."

Purchase like this, will certainly protect Last.fm from the Internet Radio Equality Act (IREA) by allowing it to tap into the bigger pockets of CBS.

Among the IREA changes are :

• Its basic royalty increases are 250% above the previous rates.

• It also requires a wholly new “per play” royalty calculation process and payment scale for stations that have significant online streaming listeners, an approach that is simply unworkable (as well as unaffordable) for public broadcasters.

Such increase in fees is bound to decrease Last.fm's competition by several fold, which may just be the event CBS is banking on right now.

Looks like Amazon and Apple's DRM-Free music has more competition. PayPlay revamped their site to support 1.3+ million songs priced from $0.88 (starting from 192kbps MP3). PayPlay was launched in summer 2006 and plans to enhance their stores with  music videos, short films, movie trailers, TV shows and etc later in 2007.

Read their full press release here.

In the recent article from San Jose Mercury News Scott Kirsner writes

... many of us have become obsessed with audience metrics of our own,    seeking a tally of how many people we're reaching as something of a touchstone - an indicator of our influence, popularity, or coolness.

He quotes Scott Beale, blogger of the Laughing Squid reporting that drop in visitor count can lead to depression. Similar opinion is shared by Daniel Klass, podcaster of The Bitterest Pill.

Evolution of todays free and very flexible metrics systems has lead to an obsession over the metrics. Bloggers are tracking where their readers are coming from, which browsers and operating systems they are using, and which are the primary referrers to their point of destination. While in the early era, it was all about the visitor counter, nowadays analytics software is very sophisticated and allows plenty of tweaking and narrowing down from one category to another.

Primary metrics services are
Google's Analytics
SiteMeter
StatCounter
Extremetracking

These are just the ones I used/heard of. But doing a simple Google Search gave me a whole bunch of other services :

FuseStats
ShinyStat
OneStatFree

Ever heard of a little kid slaying a monster hog? Well if you did not, it is certainly all over Google's Hot Trends.

List of keywords from Google's top 100

25. hogzilla 2
48. monster hog
58. alabama hog
67. giant hog
75. wild boar
77. big hog
96. monsterhog.com




The official site is site www.monsterpig.com, check it out for more pictures and comments of the actual event.

Update:

CDW is indeed being bought out. The pricetag of 7.3 Billion dollars will be paid by Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP) whose portfolio already included Paypal, XM Sattelite Radio and Nextel.

--

Everyone must have heard and probably even used CDW. It's online and printed catalog ran the government and enterprise businesses for a long time. Regular consumers were never the real target since they always seemed to loose the price wars to TigerDirect and NewEgg. Now since there is a high interest in buying out the CDW, there must be a positive outlook on how to improve its business, so we can expect to hear some interesting news if this goes through. Refer to Reuters article for more information.

Google is getting into the anti-virus arena with its latest acquisition of GreenBorder.  As the "industry's first Desktop DMZ software for windows" GreenBorder pronounces to keep safe connections, keep internet invaders out and safely open attachments from anywhere on the internet. Thats a hell of a lot to say for a small anti virus company.

As of now, GreenBorder is no longer accepting any new customers.

Personalized Searching offers a way to spot Trends in your personal search history. Go to the following link : http://www.google.com/history and click on Trends.

You can view your most popular search terms, search activity by Month, Day, Hour of Day.

Buzznet has approximately 6 million users and is a photo-sharing social networking site.
Buzznet raised $6 million of financing led by Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.



$2.5 Million went to RoofTopComedy from Azure Capital Partners.
Rooftop is a collection of comedy clips from known and rising stars, founded by a comedian and former broadcasters.



Graystripe is a mobile advertising network for in-game advertising.
$8.6 Million in Series B funding banked from Monitor Ventures and Incubic Venture Capital.

The Economist has posted its research about how large enterprise companies (average size is 2.5 Billion dollars) are using Web 2.0 and how far do they see it taking them.
Overall it is a good description of what the business thinks of Web 2.0 and what challenges and expectations does it see for it.

The concept taken as Web 2.0 is defined by the reference to O'Reilly's Blog to be

• Blog
• Enterprise 2.0
• Mash-up
• Network Effect
• RSS
• Tagging
  
• Web 2.0 Concept
• Wiki
  

Which of the above concepts are used or planned to be used?


Companies are reporting that they focused their Web 2.0 efforts on blogs, wikis, and blogs primarily for internal improvements. Going forward, they see Web 2.0 impacting interaction with customers (68% of the surveyed).



79% of the companies expect increased collaboration to increase corporate revenue and 30% expect it to reduce cost by allowing less people to do more due to an easy access to information. Blogs are viewed as brand building tools and taken very seriously by many.



Other areas include improved customer satisfaction by allowing more customized services, which is clearly a view that Web 2.0 enabled applications are superior then older ones.

71% of the companies are planning on taking advantage of online communities which includes marketing on sites like MySpace, Facebook and the rest. However only 39% see the positive aspects of tagging as anything useful.

CBS is buying a comical video blogging site oriented towards finance market for $5 million.
Here are some of the comments its viewers and reviewers posted :

“I had little interest in the stockmarket before Wallstrip…now I’m hooked!” - Cammy
“You have created a very cool product…” - CNBC Executive Producer
“Funniest Cramer Parody EVER!” - Fly on Wall Street

" If you’re a forward-thinking Web architect or designer that needs to build compelling, user-centric, Ajax-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), then this fast-paced hands-on training workshop is for you!  Web Design World Seattle has partnered with Hinchcliffe & Company to bring you this intensive Ajax Bootcamp workshop on Sunday, July 8^th. "

I Keep getting this in the email, use priority code AJAX2 to get your discount if interested.