Connecting the dots ...
Remember Kyle, the Red Paperclip Guy? Almost two years ago I reported how in only 14 trades he turned One Red Paperclip into a house. Not a doll-house, but his current 2-story, 3-bedroom home.
Since then he published a book, and is now ready to trade again. Bidding is open until July 11th. The house is in Kipling, Saskatchewan Canada.
(hat tip: Shel Israel)
Update (6/24): Here’s another guy auctioning his life.
<rant>
Quite a celebration: just the day after their $53M investment round, valuing the company at $1B (that’s Billion with a B) was announced, LinkedIn is down:
Is there a new emerging trend here? PR blitz, big announcement, site is dead. Other examples just this week:
Firefox Download Day leads to dead site.
Technorati Monster shows to celebrate investment + new ad network. ( But hey, new Sales Team here to help, instead of technologists)
Then there was twitter .. then .. then ….
</rant>
Yes, I like LinkedIN, and am one of the very early users, from the early days before social networks become trendy. Simply because, unlike some of the more fashionable networks, I actually found it useful for business.
But is it worth One Billion Dollars? Apparently it is – if you ask Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures, who just invested a whopping $53M with the even more whopping $1B valuation. $53 million is a decent exit for some startups – but LinkedIN has about $100M in annual revenues. Still, I really wonder what kind of stratospheric exit (IPO) valuation the current investors expect.
Or perhaps Kara Swisher is right:
Why go public when you can just pretend?
Exactly. 
Update (6/18): In celebration of entering the Billion-Dollar Club, LinkedIn is down.
After a really bad start the downloads are at full force. Here on my blog, Firefox 3.0 already has 25% 40% share and growing by the minute. It’s actually higher, since these are daily stats, the early hours skew skew the stats towards other browsers. Total Firefox share (all releases) is 60%.
(Chart by Zoho Sheet)
Venture capitalists have been pouring money into “clean technology” companies – $2.2 billion in 2007, an increase of 46% over 2006. Why are VCs making so many long-term, capital-intensive bets? Which technologies will be world-changing, and which will be duds?
In living proof that there is life outside the Palo Alto / Menlo Park proximity, SVASE will host a VC Panel on investing in Green Tech tomorrow at the Crow Canyon Country Club, in Danville, CA. (A very green venue for a Green Event
).
The panelists are:
Agenda:
6-6:30 pm: Networking and Hors D’oeuvres
6:30-8 pm: Panel discussion and Q/A
For details see the SVASE site, or head straight to registration.
See you there!
<rant>
What kind of a download day is this, with artificially delayed opening? As if they wanted the site to crash, all part of a PR mania – reminiscent of the iPhone Launch (the first one) on iDay. Will this become fday? As in Firefox Day, or f*day?
</rant>
TechCrunch agrees. Read also: Digital Inspiration, Mashable!, webmonkey, VentureBeat, Startup Meme, jkOnTheRun, Between the Lines,
That seems to be the Technorati recipe: TechCrunch reports they have a new Sales VP with a 7-person sales team, and a new marketing lead. This build-up was likely in preparation for the new business, Technorati Media, a newly launched blog advertising network.
Technorati indeed needs a business model, so if this is it, fine. It’s just frustrating that they’ve spent the past two years in search of business models, while their service gradually fell apart. Anyway, in the spirit of the new-new business, I suggest they sell advertising on the Technorati page we see most frequently:
This was the rant – for details see: CNET News.com, Maple Leaf 2.0, Web Strategy, Trends in the Living Networks, A Media Circus, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
Cliff Shaw is a serial SaaS entrepreneur who keeps on coming up with really useful services that just don’t make it as a business.
ProtectMyPhotos was my favorite photo backup and synchronization service. Unlike Flickr, Photobucket, Zooomr and just about all the photo site focusing on sharing your photos, this one did not require manual uploads. In fact the best feature was that after initial setup, you could completely forgot about it. Just like Mozy, the general-purpose online backup service, ProtectMyPhotos worked away in the background, non-intrusively, throttling back at times of heavier computer use. With added bells & whistles (online view & edit, sync between online and several offline versions..etc) it was a perfect service – for free, that is. Apparently it failed to attract enough paying customers, so eventually it shut down.
It did not completely die though: Cliff Shaw’s next startup, DocSyncer clearly showed signs of it’s “parent”: the UI was quite similar to ProtectMyPhotos, and they leveraged a lot from the core synchronization engine of the previous product. It looked like a perfectly executed turnaround: the existing technology found new purpose. DocSyncer filled a void left by the web-office providers: it synchronized desktop documents with Google Apps. I was quite certain they would have a short life-span, but this time with a happy ending, Google taking them out. Since the acquisition did not materialize, I can only assume either they could not come to terms or Google is already working on their own solution.
DocSyncer is about to shut down. Quote from the website:
We’ve figured out in a very short amount of time that DocSyncer is a cool tool – but not a business.
I really hate to see it go. No transition to web-based applications is complete unless we can bring our old baggage, i.e. transfer existing desktop documents to the online service. I see evidence of interest day by day, in the 100K or so hits my two “import your history to gmail” guides received. DocSyncer did better then import, it offered true synchronization, but I’d be quite satisfied just to see one-way batch import tools to Google Docs and Zoho, the two leading service providers.
The DocSyncer site says:
Until we meet again, good luck and thank you for the support!
“Meet again”: Cliff does not talk about his next gig yet, but his LinkedIn profile lists him as CEO of Picstreem. His profile also reveals four startup gigs in the past, two of which getting sold. He is a comeback guy, I am looking forward to seeing Picstreem.
In the meantime let’s hope that Google and Zoho will soon offer mass migration, perhaps synchronization.
Update (6/17/08): Wow, it’s amazing how many blogs picked up the story, all without a single bit of accreditation. Thanks, gals and guys!
Foldershare is a life-saver: a peer-to-peer file synchronization product that does its magic in discreetly in the background, with the user barely noticing it even exists. While it needs to log in to the MS servers, it does NOT sync / upload actual data, all synchronization is strictly P2P. In fact one of the setup options is to define whether you allow remote P2P sync to occur through the Net, or strictly on your LAN, behind the firewall.
I’ve been using it for years now, as part of my data sync and backup strategy: I let FolderShare synchronize data between two laptops and a desktop, then I use the desktop as the “master” which will back up data online to Mozy, the other life-saver.
Of course using two products for somewhat similar purposes is redundant, and I have previously speculated that Microsoft should tie Foldershare and Skydrive (Live Mesh, Live Drive – pick your favorite buzzword) offering both PC sync and Web backup. I wonder if it’s about to happen.
I noticed this weekend that my computers could sync without them being online at the same time – which is (used to be? ) a primary requirement for FolderShare to work. Now I could repeatedly test turning off all but one computer, update files on the one with FolderShare running, then shut down FolderShare, start another machine, and voila! – my changes got synchronized. How was that possible when it had nowhere to get the information from, other than the Microsoft servers? (unless the closed program left behind a process running, other than Foldershare.exe)
If this means FolderShare is no longer strictly a P2P product, I actually welcome that change – except for the fact that it happened unannounced. Leaving users in the belief they are only sync-ing data between their own computers when in fact it’ stored on Microsoft’s servers would be a serious violation of their privacy.
Interesting coincidence (is it?): FolderShare will have a planned outage of 48-72 hours this week. 72 hours (3 days!) is a lot of time, it should be enough for major changes. In fact more than enough – such outage would be unacceptable from any service provider – except apparently from Microsoft
. (Yes, I know, we get what we pay for, and this is a free service – it’s still a ridiculous outage.)
Update: Further testing reveals that the actual data files are not transferred between offline computers, only the *.p2p placeholder files. Sigh of relief: your data files are not stored on Microsoft’s servers. BUT …. BUT: the index is indeed stored centrally. This did not appear to be the case with the original FolderShare by ByteTaxi, prior to the MS acquisition. I don’t know when it changed, and I don’t recall being warned about it. The former FolderShare user agreement page disappeared and I haven’t found any updated information on FolderShare’s site.
Update (6/24):
Ouch! C’mon guys, this is so simple, even I could fix it.
There’ s been some speculation about a new, purple Yahoo logo. I know it was more than speculation, I saw it with my own eyes: if you opened www.yahoo.com in Firefox, you saw the purple logo for a split second, then it was replaced with the good old version.
But none of this matters anymore, here’s the new, authoritative Yahoo logo:
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