February 26, 2008 by admin.

Google. Top of the Pyramid . King of the Hill. Recession Proof. Yeah, . At some point this will all trickle down to the VC PE and VC Angel market. ComScore Data shows flat click growth- I repeat: You can not sell Advertising if people dont end up buying the products. Its very simple. The Economics of making money does not change and they apply to Google as well. They apply to Facebook which continues to be overhyped and to any area of the economy. To all the Hipsters, Web 2.0ers Web 3.0ers and any other “ers” that think that the regular economic rules dont apply to them and to their cute free and sometimes very useful and sometimes completely useless free websites: You are living in a fantasy world isolated by a “a thin film of liquid inflated with air or gas” otherwise know as a Bubble.  Sometimes it pops sometimes it deflates and sometimes it deflates and then pops but, in one way or another at some point it is no longer there.

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January 23, 2008 by admin.

Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors

Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring. Due to be released this year, the company has pre-orders from some of the biggest names in Entertainment and Technology.

 The Crunch:

Look for problems when the “biggest names in entertainment and technology “  get together. Expect a Webvan style blowup. More details later.

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January 23, 2008 by admin.

So the awards event described as ” The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.” took place.  See http://crunchies.techcrunch.com/ for a list of winners. We will crunch those winners from time to time, when there is time to take the time to give our take on where the winners are really heading. 

 From the Crunchies site:

Best Overall: Facebook

Facebook revolutionized the idea of what social networking could be.

Starting with Facebook: Good company. Great Idea. Amazing Revolution. Bad Valuation. Will be around but no where near it’s current value.  See our previous quick analysis of Facebook.  Will likely be purchased by big media company eventually, for a fraction of current value.

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January 23, 2008 by admin.

Fed action could now drive the market. There is something to look forward to. In the long run it will likely not last as it will come back to bite..no free rides ( or free money) ….. Market risk reward profile does not meet criteria of either bull or bear. Stay away from being  long or short if you can.  Cash sure looks appealing.. Speaking of risk reward … Do apples really taste that good-

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January 17, 2008 by admin.

As noted on Oct 21st (or about 1500 dow points ago and over 400 Nasdaq points ago) we were headed for a financial downturn of historical proportions, Obviously, so far that has been the case and it coninues to get worse. We still have not seen real distress on the consumer debt side and other areas but that seems to be changing. Strangely, the IPO market seems to have continued its strength in q4 of 2007. As if they are in their own little world. That is likely to change as the debt issue spread across the entire market in all areas including consumer debt and consumer spending. The pyramid will likely come tumbling down with the weak 2.0 companies falling first then the others will follow Google will survive and so will the other strong ones. They will pick up the pieces …. sounds familiar….???

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December 28, 2007 by admin.

Hulu just launched a “private beta”.  I would like to say that I was contacted by HULU and given one of the few exclusive private Beta invites  but I cant say that: The private Beta is about as private as Howard Stern’s book. Either way I have used the site and it was pretty impressive. It was clean, easy to use and the video quality was excellent. Venture Beat,in it’s overall  severely flawed analysis , strangly noted that “Hulu’s primary problem is that it doesn’t own any of the content on its site and is beholden to its content partners such as NBC and Fox.”  .  That seems like an advantage to us. In other words because this is a joint venture NBC and Fox are in a great position to become a leader if not the leader in the media driven web 2.0 world. Content is king. NBC and Fox own alot of content. NBC and Fox own 90% of Hulu. They will market the hell out of it. Given the low barriers to entry in the video market Hulu should succeed in a big way. Joost and others will likely end up in the dust. This is the first step in cutting out the middlemen like Youtube and others…..Of course nothing is that simple, Google will “fight back” but the lines have been drawn. Same in the fight with Itunes. Media companies want their content back. And they will get what they want.

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December 2, 2007 by admin.

Been a tough couple of weeks. Something to do with cars and high speed- ( my car and someone elses high speed) in any case back to writing. We had a Tri State Angel meeting. Good turnout.  Good Companies. We received many company applications and chose 4. We will write more about some of them. We chose a stroller that turns into a bike, a skin care company, a social search engine, and a technology for smart buildings. More Later. Oh, we also  formally launched another company- in the legal services Biz. More on all at the right time.

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November 7, 2007 by admin.

As per our earlier post outlining our fears of a market collapse, the situation only gets worse. We could be on the cusp of a market collapse of historical proportions. What can save this market ? I have no idea.

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November 3, 2007 by admin.

As we have been noting since the deal we view the facebook deal as an absolute waste ( besides for PR purposes). As we have stated and will state here again empahtically - Facebook is AOL all over again. There are positive and negative differences of course but the main negative is that unlike AOL where you had actual paying suscribers , Facebook is a game and not a real business. The barriers to entry are minimal.  If its that easy to go from zero to 50 million users ( at $3 per user in revenue)  well its that easy to go right back. Free is free, and if you saw how quickly paying AOL suscribers left ,one can only imagine the ease in which Facebook become meaningless. Facebook is  a mirage of a business with no real model and no real barriers. One can venture to say that Google let MS have Facebook. It only works in their favor. What is mind boggling is that people will say “you dont get it” and talk about 50 million people throwing sheep. To that I suggest have a look ; google it ; when was the last time a sheep throwing business succeeded. yes . it is different. But you get the point.

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November 2, 2007 by admin.

Back in 1999-2001 the web was filled with offers for either free or heavily discounted ( or  if you were a coupon code expert you actually had the store paying you to buy items. ) . Real web experts and pundits noted that this discounting was part of the new business model and was the “new economy ” and that companies needed to “gain eyeballs” and “establish their web brand”. We all know how that turned out ( the biggest loss in all this is that I can no longer make money by buying shampoo on drugstore.com) .That was then. Of course this is now. So What is Now? Well, you no longer can buy items for free but the new free is Software. Lots of software and lots of free software. You can get eveything from something as useful to a free CRM program to something as useless as a Facebook social network. All of course web 2.0.  Which is basically software instead of  soap and Facebook instead of Freepc.com. So if Ajax from drugstore.com was 1.0 then  Ajax from the coolest website is web 2.0. The results will likely be the same. Meanwhile enjoy the free software.

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