The Internet is quite an appetizing prospect for entrepreneurs. No matter where you work from, there are a few services that can make your business run more smoothly, and afford you more to time expand, rather than deal with mindless administration or problems when half-baked software breaks down.

1. Engage with new software

To change your business’ fortunes, new software is crucial. HTTP is what the web has been built with, but by upgrading to a brand new system, to Web 2.0 tools, user interfaces can look smarter, work faster, and catch the eye of the consumer who wants a more engaging shopping or consumer experience than just clicking through static pages, refreshing pages and having to navigate through tables of links to find what they are looking for. Software like Adobe’s Flex is an example of software that can make purchasing much more intuitive, consumer friendly, and better for business. The newer the software, the faster it works, and often, the cheaper it is to develop brand new applications – as you’ll see in the applications below.

2. Prosper

Kiva is a pioneering small charitable loans company that provides loans to third-world producers, which are subsequently paid back to the donors, and then can be paid out elsewhere. Prosper takes this micro-credit system and turns it: offering micro-credit loans for your business. If you’ve already got a successful business and want to manage loans from friends and family, or ask people to ‘bid’ to give you a loan, all with interest of course, then Prosper may be the place to find the cash injection. Peer lending has been hugely successful in the charity sector, and with a business incentive, and visible profiles of the businesses looking for loans, you can either use this as a way to use capital and exchange ideas with brand new businesses, or find your own money, without having to deal with any bank managers.

3. Campfire

Keeping in constant contact with your employees when running a virtual business, which is typically outsourced and fragmented across the globes, is crucial. With so many chat applications in use, Campfire offers one place to gather around. One of the key features is the ability to create password protected chats with clients, sharing media in real time. The application integrates well with 37signal’s other elegant software, like Basecamp. Campfire is described as “a godsend for groups”, which summarizes it nicely.

4. NetworthIQ

For the Web 2.0 businessman, award winning web application Networth IQ both keeps tracks of your finances, as well as your net worth. And for the competitive businesses owner, there’s even an option to compare your successes with people your age, or in the same industry sector.

5. Wesabe

As with many financial applications, Wesabe can integrate with your bank account, and create a report for you and your business which allows you to take better control of your business. Perfect for small start-ups, Wesabe also offers the ability to seek financial advice from fellow business owners, and talk money with people who understand the problems and risks involved in running a small business – perhaps worth signing up if only for the community involved.

6. Google Calendar

With so many people using Google for everything from email to blogging and photo sharing to document writing, it’s often easiest to use what people are already familiar with and stick to the free applications that integrate well with similar other free services. Google Calendar enables different calendars for different people, or even different clients, so that all of your employees, wherever they are, know who is meant to be doing what and when. This app makes it easy to keep on top of it all, assigning them task and changing the schedule, virtually.

7. Remember the Milk

A virtual office deserves virtual to do lists, or at least it makes sense to do use them. Rather than writing reams of to do lists for all of your projects, clients and workers, use Remember the Milk to do everything. The most integrated of all to do list clients, Remember the Milk can be shared with your contacts, placed onto a map, organized in every way you need, whilst maintaining the simplicity to get your work done, and your to do list clear.

8. LinkedIn

Virtual businesses need virtual business cards. LinkedIn is the place where you can advertise yourself, and you business, to people all around the world. Set up a profile and reaquaint yourself with old colleges, get recommendations from current workers and get introduced to a network of contacts in your field, all of whom you can allow to see your background, your expertise, and your company. Who needs a business card when you be linked to all these people digitally, automatically?

9. EyeOS

Eye OS, Eye Operating System, is a web-based operating system that allows you to create a virtual desktop that can be used wherever you are working. Like your Windows or Mac desktop, you can ensure that you always have your applications and your files with you wherever you are. Virtual business needs virtual space: EyeOS may provide just what you’re looking for.

10. Kayak

Even virtual businessmen need to travel, and since you probably aren’t spending someone else’s money, when you need to connect in the real world you’ll want to find the cheapest, fastest and most efficient way of getting there. Kayak does a lot of the hard work for you, finding cheap flights from over 140+ sites at once. With a clean interface and all the extras you need including hotels and car rentals. Kayak is the way to get where you need to go.

11. Sales Force

For Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, Sales Force is the market leader in providing marketing, sales and service, professionally running your business operations and ensuring business growth. Everything your business needs can be managed and outsourced to Sales Force.

12. Harvest

When working for clients, you want them to recognize how swiftly, or how comprehensively you’ve undertaken the work they’ve asked you to do, and how much you deserve a continued relationship. Harvest allows businesses to track time, log any expenses that you and your business incurs, and then allows you to invoice clients with a breakdown of exactly how the workflow proceeded. With nothing to install, all of your colleagues, virtual or sat next to you can use the interface. With smart desktop widgets and a strong emphasis on customer service, Harvest is a robust and simple way to conduct and manage business relationships.

However what gets me more excited is the splattering of advanced web technologies that are now in millions of people’s hands courtesy of the Apple and the iPhone. Technologies like CSS3 and sqlite that have only been implemented in the tiniest slice of browsers are now able to be taken advantage of on the iPhone.

Safari performance in iPhone OS 2.0 has been dramatically improved, and this is important because it will continue to allow developers to create great web applications instead of simply going the native Cocoa route. One of the beautiful things about creating applications for the iPhone is that you get to pick which technologies you want to use and implement them where they make the most sense. With the advanced layout rendering capabilities present in Safari, you can create some seriously powerful design logic just by using CSS3 selectors to manipulate your content.

Safari and Firefox have implemented many parts of the CSS3 specification, but the problem is if you’re releasing an application to the masses, you have to support the big ugly dog in the corner, Internet Explorer. All the cool things you can do with CSS3 don’t matter if you’re still supporting older browsers, but on the iPhone you’re only supporting one browser and it happens to have fantastic standards support.

So go ahead and bust out your shadows, rounded corners, and background images, Safari on the iPhone can take it.

Wait, what? How is that useful?

Before people get up in arms about my example, it’s on their homepage under the Unlock Meaning section for search queries to try on Powerset. Here’s a list of some other queries they’re hyping as good examples of the technology:

• actors in Pulp Fiction
• what causes diabetes
• who signed the Kyoto Protocol

Perhaps it’s just me and my above-average keyword searching capabilities, but finding these facts on Google would be trivial. When on Google and searching for “pulp fiction actors” the very first result is the IMDB listing with full information and the full answer to my query. When looking on Powerset it gives me a scrollable view of the actors. When I click on an actor, it brings me to another page which is a copy-and-paste job from Wikipedia, but on a Powerset page. The future is here!

If the benefit touted by Powerset is that you don’t have to click to the first result in the list to find your answers — instead, presenting them on the page — and that’s all they’ve got, then they’ve got nothing. The iPhone is killing the cellphone industry not because it’s “everything else that’s out there plus some other features” but because it’s a quantum leap ahead of what’s out there. When Steve Jobs announced it he talked heavily about the “high technology” features and how the technology in the iPhone is at least 5 years ahead of anything else out there. And he was right. Powerset isn’t 5 years ahead of anything, it’s just giving you what Google might have given you if you slightly alter your query.

Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand.com had a fantastic quote in the NYTimes article linked previously from which I pulled the title of this blog entry:

“They have a new and interesting technology that most people don’t really need right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and editor of SearchEngineLand.com. Mr. Sullivan also said that analyzing the meaning of pages, as Powerset does, demands so much computing power that the company is unlikely to be able to index the entire Web any time soon.

Danny his the nail on the head and drives it right into the wood. People are used to keyword searching and they’ve been perfecting their searching skills for years. Powerset gives you the same results in a different format, but it requires a different search syntax. This is like giving professional baseball players a new and improved baseball, but you have to throw it with two hands on the ball at all times. If you throw it with two hands, and do it perfectly, it will go the same speed as you used to be able to throw a normal baseball. What a feature!

Microsoft is rumored to be looking at Powerset as an acquisition target and I truly hope they buy it. If Ballmer thinks that Powerset is the key to taking down Google, then I’d love to see them try and fail over the next 2 years while they ramp up and give it a shot.

“My reason was simple: I needed something that would sync consistently with my Mac. My Blackberry-to-Mac sync has been hit or miss for the past year (though I’ve been testing a beta of the new PocketMac and it is quite good) and I’m fed up. I just want something that works.”

I’ve had an iPhone since Day One and I think people who don’t like the iPhone may simply change their tune when they handle it, use it, and analyze the overall device when it’s in their hands. Like many others have said, it’s difficult to compare an iPhone against Competitor X by solely looking at a feature comparison chart because the overall experience of the iPhone goes far deeper than just features. It’s lacking some tangible things like a 3G radio, Flash, MMS, but it has many positives like “best UI on any phone”, “simple to figure out how to do things” which are difficult to measure on any kind of chart.

Much has been made of the iPhone SDK and what is and is not allowed, and I believe that it’s just too early to be throwing platitudes around since much will be changing in the next few months leading up to the 2.0 software update. I’ve already found bugs in the SDK and have been in touch with engineers at Apple, and they have assured me that a fix is in the works. The SDK is in beta so Apple may still be figuring out a solution to allow background application processing, who knows. So many people are upset about not being able to run interpreted code but that’s like getting a brand new car and being upset it doesn’t have seat warmers; so much is offered up front and yet the angry voices of the few rise up against the happy developers mainly because those happy developers are under NDA and are busy creating killer applications.

So if you’re in the market for a new phone and need it do more than just make calls, I suggest taking a look at the iPhone. There are refurbished iPhones available for less than the normal cost, so if price is a factor perhaps take a look at those deals. I actually saved about $9 per month when switching from my Blackberry plan to the iPhone’s plan, so for me, getting an iPhone was also an economical decision!

“Why not read an email and then instantly delete it? Why do we save emails? Why do we archive them in folders for safe keeping? We don’t save phone calls. We have a conversation on the phone and then we hang up. If we need to take notes for whatever reason we do, but 99% of phone calls are completely ephemeral. And if we forget something, or we need it again, we just make another call.”

I was in the camp of people who don’t think this is a good idea, at least for me, since I have an absolutely terrible memory. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for technophiles, almost every piece of information that is now transferred between human beings is stored somewhere. For me, the most important pieces are IM conversations and email, and here are my stats for those:

• I have every IM conversation I’ve participated in since December 27, 2004 stored and fully searchable by query, date, or participants.
• I have every email I’ve received/sent since May 2, 2004, which can also be accessed in various ways.

These large data sets may not be as important for normal people, but because my memory is so poor, they’re a necessity in my life. Email search is one of the “killer apps” that I use every single day, and IM conversation search is used at least weekly.

So is memory tied to “being a pack-rat” in regards to technical storage? I’m not sure if it’s a causal relationship but if my computer can store things and keep them out of my brain, then maybe I can use my empty brain cells for other important things. Like Albert Einstein once said:

“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.” -Link

• Private Equity Buyout – There’s a slight chance that a private equity firm could purchase Yahoo with the hope of reselling down the road, but it’s a slim one. The credit crisis in America has led to tighter restrictions so we’ve seen fewer private equity acquisitions lately because of this.
• Apple – CEO Yang has been an admirer of Steve Jobs in the past (and even came on stage to introduce the iPhone) and at least one report has speculated on an Apple buyout. The problem is that Apple doesn’t have enough cash on hand and I can’t see Jobs wanting to blow their cash stash on a company that doesn’t really benefit them. Now if Apple bought Adobe that would make more sense, but Apple Yahoo?
• Google – Google has reached out to Yahoo in an attempt to outline what a bad decision the MSFT acquisition would be, but it seems Google might be holding all the cards. It’s been noted that most of Yahoo’s core services run on FreeBSD, Apache, and other open source technologies, and Microsoft’s core services run on Windows Server and Microsoft-centric technologies. If Microsoft successfully acquires Yahoo then it might tie up their collective engineering resources for a very long time trying to integrate their platforms, and that would allow Google to really push forward with its Office-killing web applications. People are saying that Google might want to acquire Yahoo, but I think Google’s secretly hoping the acquisition happens so that Google appears to be the most nimble of all technology companies.

The genius behind the Drama 2.0 blog posted his thoughts on the recession’s effect on the tech industry so I’m going to jump in and post two impacts of the recession right here.

What Will Get Cut First?
When budgets get tight and revenues aren’t as high as they were in the glory days, what will go first is marketing. You can’t dip on your core competencies and get rid of a dozen highly-skilled engineers because then you’re cutting your own throats. Getting rid of your top people and replacing them with low-level morons was the reason that CompUSA went out of business, and cutting the head off your engineering department is a similar mistake.

When advertising gets cut, the ones with the lowest ROI will be the first to get the slash, and that’s going to mean CPM advertising. With CPC, a company is putting all their effort into converting the click on their own website so they control the conversion rates. CPM ads put all the pressure on the publisher to get good click-through rates, and if they’re paying top dollar for CPM rates on popular sites and aren’t getting a good CTR, then it’s a waste of money. AdWords and AdSense aren’t going to drop much, but CPM rates will.

Investors Change Their Tune
VCs have been pouring dollars into companies like paper money is going out of style (*cough*) and 2008 will be the year they take a more careful look at their investments and investment strategy. Investing in pre-revenue companies with no revenue strategy is a lot different than pre-revenue companies that have a solid revenue strategy, and you can guess which type of company won’t be raising as much money this time around. The theory of “past success indicates future success” when it comes to startup founders is going to be flipped around and although an entrepreneur may have had a big name a few years ago, investors will realize it’s a totally new game in 2008. If you’re giving away the cow (the service) and the milk (unique value proposition) for free then you don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to introduce a revenue model for your “at scale” company. You may be big, but you’re not sustainable. And money doesn’t grow on trees anymore.

This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been a reader of Think Secret for many years, essentially since the site started, and followed the lawsuit from its genesis to now. Nick is actually a few years younger than I am, is still in college, so seeing him go up against a giant company like Apple is interesting for me since I’ve enjoyed his reporting over the years.

As part of the press release that Think Secret posted, it said that a “positive solution” had been reached for both sides. To me, that means the lawsuit has been dropped and perhaps Nick got a payoff to stop writing. I don’t know what type of payoff, perhaps Apple paid his legal fees plus some cash, but maybe it was larger than that. Maybe once the EFF got behind Nick’s case Apple realized they were going to lose, so they decided to turn the tables and stop that from happening. If Nick won then other rumor sites could safely pursue information inside of a protective Apple NDA without worrying about the legal consequences, so by Apple paying off Nick it stopped the forthcoming rumor flood.

Ars Technica mirrors my sentiments in that they also believe he got a nice payday:

“Apple was faced with losing the case and having to pay attorney’s fees,” explained Opsahl, which is likely part of the reason why it decided to settle instead of continuing to pursue it. As for Ciarelli, “We understand that Nick is very satisfied with the outcome of the case,” Opsahl said. “We hope that Apple learns a lesson over this.”

With a wad of cash in his pocket and some real journalistic work experience behind him, Nick can no move forward and has many opportunities to choose from. Of course those opportunities don’t include writing about Apple rumors, but there could be far worse outcomes to this story.

Google’s Open Handset Alliance announced last week had a lot of hand-waiving and fun illustrations, but was short on actual product. Phones running Google’s Android platform are nearly a year away from being in consumer’s hands, so there are a lot of questions still up in the air. If Google were to acquire Sprint Nextel, it would certainly give more credibility to their hand in the poker game of their cellphone “alliance” and might open up some additional avenues in regards to generating revenue.

So many people hate the telecom industry and cable companies that if Google were to purchase Sprint and use their infrastructure to build out a high-speed, long-distance wireless network, I can see many people ditching Comcast or TimeWarner and jumping on the Google bandwagon. Broadband pipes are so locally saturated in the major metropolitan areas that wireless alternatives might be a good fit for people fed up with lobbyists having a larger impact on their cable companies then their own petitions. Personally I’d love to see Google sell a WiMAX set-top widget that would coordinate with a cellphone widget to push WiMAX speeds to me wherever I am. Unfortunately with Google pursuing the handset alliance it seems if these pipe dreams (no pun intended) come true, iPhone users will be left out in the cold. At least until a 3G iPhone appears and by then anything is possible.

“That sums up Yahoo! Search in a nutshell; the whole point is we want to get you from “to do” to “done.” Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users — their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.”

Yahoo!’s new Search Assist feature is essentially a metadata browser that pulls up related phrases and information that may be useful to someone who has just entered a query. They show how it automatically drops in live Yahoo! Videos, Flickr images, and more right into your search results list, but how does this actually help them take down Google? Google is a verb, their search algorithm and datastore are far superior to Yahoo!’s, and to prove it it was only back in 2004 that Yahoo! decided not to use Google anymore for their own search results, because prior to then for a few years, they used Google. Yahoo! has been paying the price of their initial folly for awhile now (the folly being that “search” is not just another feature tacked onto their portal like “stocks” and “horoscopes” and is a utility in its own right) and this is their attempt to pull some users away from Google’s grasp.

The problem is that this doesn’t solve The Problem and that would be answering people’s questions in a real life scenario — who cares about videos and images when I just want an answer? To show an example, a commenter brought up this comparison:

• “Sprint store near glendale arizona” on Google
• “Sprint store near glendale arizona” on Yahoo!

See the difference? Google identifies what I’m trying to find and helps me solve the problem complete with a map. Yahoo! doesn’t help me find anything. Screw the Search Assist and the videos and the images, just solve my problem. And Google does that just fine.

Here’s a review of the keyboard, it’s a beautiful little gadget that works perfectly.

Both the 770 and the keyboard for $260 USD and they’re both in pristine condition. Shoot me an email via the contact form if you’re interested in buying them!

Update: Sold!

My current phone situation is pretty messed up, but I’m seriously considering an 8700c from Cingular. Although some friends of mine prefer the Treo’s form-factor and UI, I have to say that I’m a sucker for how the Blackberry looks. One of the things that seals the deal for me and the Blackberry is how much you can customize the interface (super hot theme pic!) and since I’m a UI guy that’s a huge plus. I’m not sure if you can thoroughly change the entire look and feel of the Treo’s Palm interface, but there is a nice theme-builder IDE for the Blackberry which I’ve been drooling over. A third competitor in the space is the new Nokia E61 — Om just got one and this morning he was trying to convince me to buy that instead of the Blackberry, so it’s definitely a tough choice. Since I despise Windows CE, the Motorola Q is out of the picture for me, which is tough because it’s a pretty nice device as well.

Here’s what emails normally fool me:

Intelligent eBay Spams
Back a few weeks ago my puppy chewed up my girlfriend’s Movado watch box and she was pretty upset. I hopped on eBay and quickly bought a box that a nice woman in Texas was selling, but since I haven’t used eBay in awhile it slipped my mind that I had won the auction. A few days later, I received an “Unpaid Item Dispute” email from eBay alerting me to my wicked ways, so I clicked through on the link and bam, fake URL pretending to be eBay. I’d been fooled! Funny enough, after I sorted out all the payment details with the real seller, I received about 10-15 more Unpaid Item Dispute emails, with items like DSLR Cameras and Navy Blue Abercrombie Tee-Shirts, both of which seem like the type of stuff I might buy. Damn those spammers know me well.

Non-specific Subject Lines
Most spam emails I receive have subject lines like “Buy OEM Software” or “WINNING NOTIFICATION FOR CATEGORY…”, but some spam emails I get just have subject lines like “what’s up” or “hey you know what?” and they always burn me. Between friends I rarely use capitalization in my emails, so lowercase subject lines make me think they’re from somebody I know….. blast!

Sorry WAMU
Out of every bank-related spam email I get, I get spammed from fake Washington Mutual banks the most. I have spam filters setup in Apple Mail to automatically delete anything that has the phrase Washington Mutual in it, which takes care of the spam problem. Unfortunately for Washington Mutual bank, that also means that I will never be a customer because I’d have to un-set my WAMU deletion preferences and deal with every WAMU email as though it could be something real and important, which I don’t have time for.

So what fools you?

I don’t use Skype for calling friends, however nabbing this phone and using SkypeOut to call their regular numbers seems pretty fly. I read somewhere that the bummer is that there’s no web interface for the phone, so if you’re at an airport or another “hotspot” that you don’t control and have to login through the web to use, you won’t be able to do so, so no free calls. But at home I think that could be really badass.

I do use VoIP in my “office” already: I have a Cisco 7940 hooked up to VoicePulse Connect, with my G5 acting as the Asterisk server. Running Asterisk on my work computer (with Photoshop, Mail, TextMate, Adium, iTunes and Transmit running 100% of the time) takes the voice quality down a few notches, so I’m seriously considering buying an Intel Mac mini, sticking it and the Cisco phone on its own switch, and then running Asterisk on the mini to boost phone quality. Add to that the new Netgear Wifi Skype phone and a SkypeIn number and I’ve got some serious hotness.

So what’s your VoIP situation look like? Are you already running VoIP? Is it through your cable provider, Vonage, or a do-it-yourself plan like VoicePulse? What’s up?

• Adium — The best instant messaging client on any platform happens to be only for Mac OS X. Totally customizable, ad-free, open source, tabbed chatting, XHTML/CSS theming, it kicks major ass.
• Apple Mail — Apple Mail is my email client of choice. It’s very fast, very stable, and does everything I want. Also, it has some really nice add-ons, like…
• Mail.appetizer — This is an add-on for Apple Mail that I cannot live without, and as soon as you install it you won’t be able to live without it either. If you have Mac OS X 10.4, Mail.appetizer pops up transparent window with the first few paragraphs of a new mail message, and lets you mark it as read, delete it, or view the message without actually having Apple Mail as your frontmost application. Instead of clicking on the Mail icon in your dock to see that you have a new message that turned out to be spam, you can delete it instantly in about 1 second. A serious time saver if you’re at your Macintosh all day long.
• TextMate — TextMate is my editor of choice now, surpassing BBEdit full-time about 8 months ago. The tabbed project view is great, every site I’m working on has its own TextMate project associated with it.
• Transparent Dock — Doesn’t really do anything useful except take your dock background away, but I can’t live without it.

Those are just the ones that may not be in usage on your machine. Obviously I’m in Photoshop, Safari, iTunes and Transmit all day long, but those are more common so I didn’t list them. Got any favorites?

San Francisco, Calif. – April 1, 2006 – Meetro, the world leader in Instant Messaging software announced today it has entered into an agreement to acquire Friendster, one of many social software sites for keeping in touch with friends and hooking up with new people.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We’re excited to be acquiring Friendster because we can leverage their web 2.0 technology,” said Paul Bragiel, CEO of Meetro. “This acquisition gives Meetro another brand name in its warchest, similar to Infogrames purchasing Atari a few years back.”

Friendster will provide Meetro users the ability to see who’s looked at their profile to encourage a greater number of ‘random hookups’ without the need for alcohol. Leveraging Meetro’s location-based technology will allow users to see other members in ‘real-life’ and avoid a common photo profile pitfall known as “the angles.”

Paul told me some additional information about the sale, notably, that he traded in his Honda Civic DX for Friendster since the $17,000 CDN Blue Book value for the Civic was so close to the Friendster valuation at the time of purchase. As part of the deal, Friendster executives will be driving his Civic around the Bay Area, while Paul’s end of the deal forces him to actually use Friendster, a feat that no one has actually done for years now.

The details of the hand job were not disclosed.

Jason O’Grady posted some Photoshop-related benchmarks that compared the new 2.0Ghz MPB to the previous 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook, and the results were shockingly bad.

The first test turned an image of a lightning bolt into a kaleidoscoped version of it, with rotating and blurring. The MacBook Pro took nearly 43 seconds vs. the G4 Powerbook taking about 30 seconds. The second test takes a 10MB image and scales it up to half a gigabyte, with sharpening done at each small step. The MacBook Pro took 4 minutes 3 seconds, while the G4 Powerbook only took 2 minutes 16 seconds.

In both tests, the new MacBook Pro was thoroughly trounced by the previous generation Powerbook because Rosetta emulation of Photoshop is absolutely terrible. I’ve also heard reports that the emulation is buggy as well as being slow, with random Photoshop crashes happening when switching between applications. I can’t wait until the Intel PowerMacs come out, because that same day I’m going to buy a quad version of the old G5 ;)

“I’m still curious how they plan to turn this into an actual business, and how they plan to deal with the non-existent barrier to entry in their space. I wish them the best of luck!”

I responded to that comment with this:

“Matt – the barrier to entry isn’t trivial by any means. Interoperating with the major IM services (since they update their connection protocols often and like to lock-out 3rd parties) is a major pain, so these guys deserve all the credit they’re given.”

Many people feel as though all “web 2.0″ companies with funny names are all in the same boat, but that’s certainly not the case. Lumping all the new companies together is probably bad for the whole, considering there are many companies doing amazing things but I’d say even more companies who will probably fail this year. Here are some separators/questions that I think all “web 2.0″ companies should be analyzing and answering themselves:

Are we actually useful or just fun to play with?
Are we actually innovating or just mashing/copying?
Are there barriers to enter our market, or can anyone be us?

Analyzing Meebo

I like Meebo. I like the service they provide, and the 3-person team is really friendly and approachable. I had the good fortune of conversing with Seth via email and he asked me if I’d like to join the Meebo team as their lead visual designer. Although I’d really like to design/redesign Meebo and their services, the full-time job thing is just not my bag anymore. Here are my answers to the above questions regarding Meebo:

Meebo is actually useful, actually innovative, and there are barriers to enter the market. Meebo is incredibly useful — anyone who is away from their main computer, or spends the majority of their time somewhere else other than their house (people who work in offices, college and high school students, etc.) can use Meebo. I can’t even imagine how many thousands of students are on IM right now courtesy of Meebo. The company is innovating because interoperating with the various IM protocols is incredibly difficult, and because those protocols are often changed with no notice given to 3rd party clients, I’d say that Meebo has done a phenomenal job. There are barriers to enter the market, because for the most part the Meebo competitors are Java applet-based or are incredibly buggy from what I’ve seen, and Meebo’s infrastructure is elegant and smooth. With the hundreds of thousands of Meebo users online, I’m positive that their revenue model will present itself soon.

Analyzing 43 Things

43 Things is a site where people find and make lists of the goals and aspirations they have in their life. You pick “43 things” that you want to do, and then others can look at your goals and agree with yours or pick their own. I’ve been told that once you choose your 43 goals, you can’t pick any more — that seems kinda odd to me, but maybe they’ve changed that policy. An Amazon-backed creative team called The Robot Co-op put it together, and here are my answers to the same questions about 43 Things:

43 Things is fun to play with, mashing/copying, and has no barriers for entry. 43 Things isn’t useful in the sense that it lets you get anything done, but it is a ton of fun to play with it and see what other people want to do. I’ll call it a mashup because you’re essentially just adding/modifying/deleting tags and blog entries, and viewing other people’s tags and blog entries, but for 43 Things they’re all related to life goals. 43 Things is innovative in how they are remixing the idea of tagging, so they’re walking a fine line between innovation/mashup. There aren’t any barriers to enter this market, considering the Ruby on Rails framework provides easy methods of duplicating the 43 Things functionality for the most part.

Analyzing Flock

Flock is an updated and refreshed version of the Firefox web browser that adds geeky built-in functionality to connect to weblog services, Flickr, Delicious, etc. They’re still in beta and for good reason — building on top of Firefox with totally custom development is going to take a lot of time to get right. Here are my answers for Flock:

Flock is fun to play with, actually innovative, and there are barriers to enter the market. Flock is useful to only a small percentage of the population, so for now I’ll say that simply fun to play with until tech-centric things like Delicious or blogging takes off for the majority of the population. Even though I harp on Flock a bit, I still think that what they’re doing is totally innovative and would never take that away from them. Modifying the entire source code of a web browser? Yeah, I’d say that’s a strong barrier.

Analyzing Online Calendars

Michael Arrington wrote last month about the “online calendar space” and how many new companies are being formed around this concept. While I’ve played with most of them, none of them look particularly novel or useful enough for me to use them everyday. Here are my answers:

Online calendars are fun to play with, mashup/copies, and have no barriers for entry. I won’t say that online calendars are useful, simply because Outlook dominates the enterprise and workplace scene and it’s nearly impossible to break into that industry. Online calendars are good in theory, however I don’t see any that link to my email client, Apple Mail, considering all events in my work are somehow tied to an email since email is still used to set up meetings and whatnot. Because I still need to email somebody then add it to my online calendar, the two-step process doesn’t really do it for me. If someone built a kick-ass Mail add-on that let me right click on email messages and generate calendar items/events based on their content, then I’d be really excited. Online calendars are not innovative, considering people have been producing online calendar applications since the 90s — I’ve yet to see a feature or innovation that really stood out in my mind as amazing, and because of that all the online calendars have essentially the same featureset. There are no barriers for entry, because any 16 year old with Javascript knowledge can put together an online calendar system.

Making The Bucks

There are essentially only two different revenue models affixed to new “web 2.0″ companies: charge for a product or service, or give away the service and charge advertising (or both.) If you put together a service that is attractive and useful enough, the eyeballs will come and advertising dollars will follow — this seems to be the revenue model of choice for many new companies, and this is the saving grace for new “web 2.0″ companies who put out a service that’s not useful or innovative, but is incredibly cool. People seem to like wasting their time learning more about other people’s aspirations, but if 43 Things charged for that service then it’d go down the tubes since it’s not useful. And therein is the cardinal sin of “web 2.0″: if a product/service is not useful, you cannot charge for it. My theory is that so many new “web 2.0″ services are free because they know that they haven’t put together something useful enough to charge any money for it :)

And in other news …… I need to lay off the LSD!

• Find a domain that nobody has registered, buy it, brand it, rock it out.
  This is what we did for Business Logs. Basically when we were thinking about the name of our new company a few years ago, we put together a list of 25 open URLs (made from a concatenation of normal English words) that were available, and then out of those we chose businesslogs.com as the URL and company name. We started with little money, so purchasing a high quality domain was out of reach — we had to build a high quality site/brand from scratch without a really rememberable name. Companies that fall under this category include Campaign Monitor, CrazyEgg, Blinklist, Bloglines, Tailrank, and many others.
• Number + word = crazy delicious!
  Not many people are doing this anymore because it’s slightly played out, but there are a ton of XXword.com domain names available if you’re still interested. You’ve got 411metro, 60 Spots, 43places, 37signals, 23hq, 9rules, and a partridge in a pear tree!
• Buy a “web 2.0″ name, brand it, tell people how to spell it.
  The problem with the zany domain names that people are purchasing nowadays is that when you tell somebody — either in person or over the phone — what your domain name is, you’ll probably have to spell it after you do so because the word is not a normal word or there are multiple periods in the domain. Companies that fall under this category include Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us (after some dough influx they jumped into the next category), Flickr, Edgeio, Reddit, Chuquet, Megite, Simpy, and many others.
• Take angel or VC money, drop some major cash on a prime domain name, brand it.
  One-word domain names, using words that everybody can say and spell, are basically all gone. If you want your company to have that nice office on Madison Ave., you’re going to have to pay through the nose, and most likely that won’t come until after you’ve taken some funding. Ning was originally called 24hourlaundry, Flock used to be Round Two, Facebook paid mid-six figures to switch to “facebook.com” from their old “thefacebook.com”, my friend Tony Conrad’s company ponied up dough for Sphere, and then Del.icio.us stumbled upon the sans-period version of their domain after they got cash as well.

I personally like the two-word contractions, just because they’re easy to say, people can spell them (unless you pick fake words), and a two-word company gives you one extra word for branding purposes. Of course my view is probably a bit slanted because business.com and logs.com wouldn’t sell ;)

Big up to Nick since he writes about 9rules once in awhile. I’m expecting that courtesy to stop immediately, not only because I just busted his chops in this entry, but because he’s a big mothercuffer now and us little guys were his stepping stones. :)

Fancy Gadgetry

I’ve known about the Nokia 770 internet tablet for awhile now, just because when it launched it soaked up a lot of gadget blog press. I just read a 9-page review at MobileBurn and it seems like a cool little device: Bluetooth, Wifi, a Linux-based OS running the Gnome window manager, a big screen, a nice web browser, and lot more stuff. Pair it with a slick Bluetooth fold-up keyboard and I might have a winner!

The small number of actual applications for it is not really a problem, considering I can write & save text and keep track of stuff all from within a browser. 770 + Bluetooth keyboard = around $500. Cheapo Mac laptop would be a few hundred more, and possibly worth it if I used it more than a week or so per year, but the coolness and form-factor of the Nokia internet tablet might take the cake. Plus can you imagine somebody chilling with a 770 and a Bluetooth keyboard at your local coffee spot? It’d be the sickness!

Many people have tried to define “web 2.0″ as social networking, or technology-infused user experiences, or whatever, but to me, “web 2.0″ is this:

While the dotcommers were making really cool stuff in the late 90s, younger people like me (middle school, high school) were idolizing them and aspiring to run dotcom companies once we got a bit older. Now that we are older (19-25 or so), and have witnessed the demise of the dotcom era, we’ve vowed to make even better dotcom companies that kick way more ass than our idols ever kicked.

Basically, my generation saw what happened, learned from it, and is now having a crack at it. We’ve collectively come up with some really cool stuff (Ruby on Rails, popularizing AJAX, etc.) and are trying to one-up the dotcom companies from the late 90s in many ways — in business planning, customer communication, interface design, technology implementation, and many others. Web 2.0 could be considered the collective “me too” spoken by young people who were too young to participate in the dotcom boom of the 1990s, and are now ready to take on the world in the 2000s.

That’s my definition, what do you guys think?

<div class="paragraph Body" style="line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; color: #ffffff; line-height: 20px;">Twenty-something male married to a gorgeous twenty-something </div>

And it does that for every single line of text! Instead of just using <p> tags, which, you know, should be used for paragraphs, they use <div class="paragraph">!!! It’s so atrocious that it reminds me of Frontpage-generated code from the late 90s, except this time, it still uses CSS but it’s ugly. It’s almost impossible to output code like this unless you really try hard.

Damn, Apple, you get two thumbs waaaay down for this. The only excuse you have is if you were rushing to get this out the door, and even then that’s not a valid excuse. Ugly, unmaintainable code that’s not semantic at all nor easy on the eyes. As a Mac user, I’m ashamed!

MacBook Pro Display Woes

As a designer, all the pixels on a display count. I constantly have Illustrator, Photoshop, Safari, TextMate, and other applications open to do my daily work, so when I found out that the new MacBook Pro has as bigger display but fewer pixels it ticked me off a bit. The previous PowerBooks had 1440×960 resolution displays (1,382,400 pixels) while the new MacBook Pro displays are missing 60px vertically and sport 1440×900 resolutions (1,296,000 pixels). This is a decrease of about 6.25% in the number of pixels, which translates into a missing block of pixels 1440x60px wide. That really long rectangle could have held a longer Photoshop image, more GarageBand instrument tracks, more video overlays in a timeline, more icons on your desktop, your Dock, and a host of other things. 60px may not be a lot to some of you, but for pro-level users it’s almost a slap in the face and a huge downgrade. I want my 60 pixels back!

Yes, the new displays are brighter, but come on, the previous generation PowerBook displays were already amazing so what more do you really need? Did anybody out there actually yearn for better PowerBook displays or think the current ones needed dramatic improvement? Out of everyone I spoke with in the 9rules MWSF chatroom I don’t remember anyone complaining about how the old PowerBook displays sucked. Would you be willing to trade 86,400 pixels for a brighter screen? I certainly wouldn’t. It’s like cutting off your big toe but making your remaining toenails all shiny and polished. Just not worth it.

Connections Don’t Matter

Another major “feature” that irked me was that the new MacBook Pro doesn’t have an S-Video port like the previous generation. I’ve given presentations where that port has come in handy saved my life, so not having it there is like a car being produced with one fewer airbag. In case of an emergency, you are now missing the connector that might make the difference between a perfect presentation and one that crashes before getting off the ground. Adapters are available, but I’m the type of person who regularly forgets his cellphone charger when traveling (that’s why I currently own 4 chargers, strewn about my place) so me remembering a DVI-SVideo dongle is not very likely.

Apple has been pimping its FireWire 800 interface for a little while now, so it’s only natural that its pro-level machines have it….. right? Nope. The new MacBook Pro is lacking a FireWire 800 port, so everybody who dropped cash on half-terabyte FireWire 800 drives is probably sucking wind right about now. I found this omission a bit odd, considering how much Apple pimped the old PowerBook’s FireWire connectivity.

Backing Up Is Hard To Do

For creative professionals who dream in uncompressed video, images, and audio, backing up is a way of life. I personally back up constantly, afraid that my work might get tainted somehow and I’ll lose that perfect layout that I sweated over. The current MacBook Pro doesn’t have dual-layer DVD burning anymore, something that the previous generation had that was totally useful. Now I have to backup my work onto separate DVDs — huge pain in the ass.

Maybe sticking the dual-layer burner in there would make it too thick? Nope, the 17″ PowerBook has a dual-layer burner and it’s just as thin as the new MacBook Pro. What a conundrum.

I’m Still Waiting

I think it was a bit premature to jam the new Intel processor into the PowerBook, simply because many professionals use these pro-level laptops to get actual work done, and with fewer pixels, fewer connections, and one less way to backup a computer (not to mention the lack of AltiVec/Velocity Engine which slows multimedia processing waaaaaaaay dowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwn regardless of how speedy the clock cycles run) I think I’m going to wait until the next version of the MacBook Pro, or pick up a 15″ PowerBook and hope for the best.

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