Interesting way to waste your money

From TechCrunch:

San Diego based Digital Telepathy has changed direction from strategy-public relations to services, with a new model that will appeal to anyone who has ever wanted or needed a hand at getting their startup ideas off the ground.

The concept is simple: Digital Telepathy offers three design my business options with varying service levels based on the length of each plan. The 15 day plan provides a wannabe startup with market research, strategic alignment, scalable revenue model, instruction manual for project completion and a concept summary delivered as a “Biz in a Box”. The 45 day plan offers (in addition to the 15 day plan) “initial buzz building,” and a range of design services including basic prototyping, usability testing, blueprints, concept mapping and other design services. The 90 day plan adds development services including full scale back-end development for beta release, front end development, private beta invites, feature development and more.

Defensio - Spamming the Block or Blocking the Spam

A new startup appropriately named Defensio has launched its flagship product for helping users deal with spam in comments. At the onset it sound like a great idea, help weed out the crap from the useful reviews submitted by your readers. But is it just another long overdue, now obsolete tool?

It seems that from one point of view, Defensio is an obsolete tool, since there are much better options available to content publishers to help them weed out bad comments. One example comes to mind is picture Captchas, or local Captchas or the service that helps OCR books into databases. All of these are very useful tools to eliminate 90% of spam in your comments, leaving 10% of to be analyzed manually or just ignored. People are surprisingly adept to ignoring garbage on the page, left there intentionally by evil doers, so 10% of spam is not such a big deal.

On the other hand, Defensio's system with its automated sorting by "spaminess" is a god send for those who receive lots of spam, because they did not build in the basic defense for preventing
it. Conclusion, it is still a useful tool.

However, with its launch and its silent marketing campaign to raise awareness of itself, can they really gain any revenue with their business model (charging only big blogs a small monthly fee $5-$15)? My opinion is that they won't, especially with new technologies being developed that prevent spammers from event submitting their garbage.

Take care.

In the world of Online - Why does anyone care about offline

In the world of online everything, there are still many companies receiving funding for providing access to their non-unique services offline. My victim today is SocialText, which in the course of the last five years received $15 million worth in funding, with the latest round of $6 million occurring in recent weeks.

SocialText makes a wiki, but not just any kind of wiki. They may a wiki that supports offline editing of its pages. What does offline editing really mean? Does it refer to the ability of working on something when not connected to the network/internet saving the work and uploading it to the main app once connected, or could it refer to the ability to edit something on a desktop application, instead of the browser. If we pick the first explanation, the most likely one, the absurdity of SocialText's product becomes quite apparent. In the world where a connection to the internet (wired or wireless) is become ubiquitous do we really need the ability to be able to edit our wiki pages when offline. Since we are moving towards having the connectivity everywhere, the only place that the offline editing of the wiki pages might be useful would be in a remote cave somewhere high up in the mountains. And I am sure if you find yourself in that position, the last thing on your mind is "editing wiki pages offline".

So why do investors throw money away on companies with such unbelievably stultifying ideas. Wasting more and more cash on these startups, no FinishUps, is money well wasted not well spent. Because, in the case of SocialText, 5 years down the road with growth expectations being anything but unachievable, why would you pour in more funds in the long dead, poorly run, un-innovative company.

Note: Finish Up - a startup that has burned through its VC money and has been around for too long, and should finish up and close up shop.

"More millions wasted today on Web 2.0 than was spent on [insert your favorite world problem here]"

Today's favorite world problem: providing security and food to the war ravished zones around the world.

Take Care

The Social Networking API

Starting this past Wednesday, Google's PR machine has been in high gear promoting its next biggest "free" offering. The Social Networking API, designed by Google and supported by a few big and small social networking sites, is suppose to act like the Facebook killer we were all hoping it be. I for once admired this venture because it was focused on completely alienating Facebook and shutting down the most useless website on the net. Why most useless, because it offers nothing new in terms of features, its interface is blend and uninviting, and most of all because people are dumb enough to fall for the next mediocre thing when they get bored with whatever they used before.

That being said, Google's plan to curb Facebook's growth and success is not going to work out in their favour. The problem is with the fact that since all of the major social networking sites are getting on board and Google inviting anyone, Facebook is more than likely to jump at this opportunity. I mean, wouldn't sound great if Facebook announced the support for the API and declared that "You can use you custom apps on our site, where we have 30 million more users than our nearest competitor". Where will the developers end up, in your opinion? Facebook of course, and the final result will be Google's dumbass idea to create the open standard that Facebook will use gain even more market share.

Way to go Google. Real smart decision.

What should have been done instead? Well, since they were working with MySpace for a year before the launch date, why wouldn't you invite a few other major sites and just create a proprietary standard for the members, not everyone. This way your market segment would have been bigger, the smallest guys would want to join, and Facebook would lose developers, users, and money - The Ultimate Revenge of the Nerds.

But, the people at Google decided to put a fake show on the road to keep up their image of being open source oriented company. Since it is all a farce, (why don't they open up their Apps project or any other closed source enterprise they got going on), Google has evidently shot itself in the foot.

Get out of the Social Networking Market Google, you're not good at it, and never will be. Focus on your core products, and leave the bickering to the other morons. And sell off Orkut, its just wasting your hardware resources.

Take Care.

Wire Node - Finally a usefull tool

Just got a tip from one of my readers about his web 2.0 mobile project. WireNode is a provide/generator of mobile sites for your blog or website. The basic idea is, you provide an blog with an RSS feed and WireNode will make a simple site for you with your own URL (GoITExpert example "http://goitexpert.wirenode.mobi/"). It is a great new way to bring your content to the growing mobile market and I think WireNode has taken the lead in it.

Beyond the basic configuration and setup, the guys at WireNode allow you to customize the appearance and the content on you mobile site with widgets, designs and addition of new pages. The interface is simple to understand and use, anyone should not have any trouble finding their way around.

Again, great idea but I'm not sure how these guys are planning to make money off the service, although providing custom links on the site at bottom of the page would be a good start.

Good luck on your venture WireNode.

The money spent on this idea was not waste because it provides a unique and useful service to its users.

Take Care

ScratchBack - Take that Google

Just noticed a new startup, this one is pretty interesting, new and innovative. ScratchBack is a new version of the now banned Text-Link-Ads.com, but apparently it is compatible with Google's policy on back linking since it uses javascript to offer "tips" when you hover over the link. It is an interesting and a UNIQUE idea, which definitely deserves some interest from VCs.

At this point I am very disappointed with Google's crack down on paid text links, since it turns our favourite search engine into a Police "Search" State that exercises its overwhelming power over a large chunk of internet users by telling them what they can and can not do on their sites. Why don't they penalize their own sites. As far as I can recall, anytime you type in anything related to Google in their search it always comes out first, no matter how new or unimportant it may be. So whom ever believes that Google does not favour its own sites is a blind and a deaf person. Wake up and smell the scent of your morning piss dude.

5Min - What, everyone is good at something, you kidding right?

Recently TechCrunch profiled 5Min How To video Startup raised another $5 million dollars in angel financing to "grow" their business of providing a way for people to upload and share "how to" videos on different topics.

So what is so special about this "Startup"? Well, since the company's motto is "everybody's good at something" and they style themselves as a Life Videopedia (way to ruin the English language by inventing dumb sounding words) you would think that they would bring something unique to the YouTube dominated niche of the Internet. Apart from slow motion re/play, they really don't put forth anything original. Oh wait, yes they do, they limit your videos to 5 minutes. Now that's a sure way to gain a user base and generate some ad revenue from potential advertisers.

And who in this world needs yet another video sharing site. The fact that there are tons of existing ones (and good ones) out there does not seem to deter investors from financing these new "unbelievably useless" startups, wasting their money on enterprises that in a year or too will burn through their cash and close up shop. Who hires these VCs to manage people's money?
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch thinks that 5Min is on a roll, I am sure he means on a good roll. I am argueing otherwise. 5Min is on a roll "DOWN" the hill people. Does anyone really think that these guys could make $5 million back, never mind the 20-50% return expected by investors, when it took YouTube a helping hand from Google to figure out how to properly monetize their user content. If you do, then you belong in the same stinky pool as the founders and investors of 5Min.

I started this blog to profile and b*tch about companies like these, to make people see that we are sponsoring and investing in companies that add no real value to our economies or in any way shape or form help improve our standard of living. Sure there are a few that do make a difference, although very little, by making our lives more productive and letting us spend more time away from our computers and the internet. Internet is a tool, all of the sites and applications are its components - do not let it take over your life and consume you. It will lead to no good things.

One way to prevent companies like 5Min from even receiving VCs attention is to no use their services, or make your Capital managers invest in companies that do make a difference.

Since the company is from Israel my "wasted money quote" will refer to the conflict there.

More millions was wasted today on Web 2.0 than : "On providing aid to the people affected by the war between Israel and Palestine"

Take care