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Bootstrapping is One Answer

Posted on Tuesday, Oct 2nd

The VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance post has generated great discussion. In it, a theme that emerges over and again, is Bootstrapping. You have read a few of my prior writings on Bootstrapping [Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy and Again? and Protect Your Dilution]. There is no doubt at all anymore that bootstrapping is, indeed, becoming sexy again.

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It’s About Place (Part 8)

Posted on Tuesday, Sep 25th

by Cal McElroy, Guest Author When I started this discussion on PlaceSmart Search and PlaceID back in May, there was a list of topics and issues I wanted to cover, but no clear vision on how to finish the series. As a start, here is a quick recap of the discussion: Paid local search, while

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Web 3.0: PeopleID, and Plaxo

Posted on Friday, Sep 14th

While we are on the topic of PlaceID and PeopleID, I should tell you about my recent visit with Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub, and VP of Marketing John McCrea. Ben Golub was, prior to Plaxo, the CMO of Verisign. Ben’s first Silicon Valley job was cutting apricots in an orchard which was paved over to

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Web 3.0 Indexing: PlaceID and PeopleID

Posted on Thursday, Sep 13th

I wrote last week, that we need to include Place in the Web 3.0 formula, and this week Cal McElroy introduced the concept of PlaceID, a unique identifier which enables all content on the web to be indexed by Place. As I was thinking through this, and exchanging emails will Cal, we also felt that

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Web 3.0 and Verticalization

Posted on Thursday, Sep 6th

I have worked with the Web 3.0 framework for months now, and taken a crack at defining how the web is likely to evolve in the future. So here’s a recap of the thesis so far. I will be adding a dimension to this framework shortly, so it is a good time to stop and

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Online Dating & Web 3.0 (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Aug 10th

M&A and VC activity Match.com, a business unit of IAC, acquired edodo in China and Netclub in France in February this year. Match operates 35 country sites in 15 languages. The deal will add 4 million subscribers to Match.com’s already existing 15 million. In January 2007, Meetic acquired DatingDirect, a UK online dating site, for

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Online Music & Web 3.0 (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 31st

Top Music Sites and Rankings Among the online music portals, AOL Music has 15.66% market share (including Napster’s 2.6% market share) and more than 350,000 music subscribers to its credit. The site attracted 161,497,557 users in December 2006. AOL Music is the leading online music site with 25.2 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Music

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Facebook’s Monetization Strategy (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Jul 27th

I’ll give you one more vertical, and then stop. You can figure out the rest yourselves. Travel is a great vertical for Facebook, and in fact, creating contextual services like Group Travel could be very cool. According to the latest data published by eMarketer, online travel sales zoomed to over $78.8 billion in 2006 in

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