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Deal Radar 2008: Xanga Losing Steam?

Posted on Thursday, Jan 17th

Xanga is a free Web-based service that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, videoblogs, audioblogs, and social networking profiles and is popular around the globe. It is packed with features and is one of the easiest ways to get a blog up and running. It also has a real community feel to it. Xanga Setup Wizard has made

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Web 3.0 & Google (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Dec 18th

Vertical Strategy Google has adamantly maintained that a magically simple, clean User Interface is part of its key to world domination. This year, however, we have started seeing a clear trend towards verticalization of the web. In fact, my entire Web 3.0 thesis is based on verticalization, and Vertical Search, in particular, is a key

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Funware and Social Games – All the World’s a Game

Posted on Thursday, Dec 6th

By Gabe Zichermann, Guest Author Status games are universal, powerful and profoundly engaging. From the shiny new car, to the right education, from your eBay rating to FB TopFriends position, people are preoccupied with status in a way that transcends all other forms of competition. By taking a step back from the traditional definition of

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Yahoo Must Acquire Shutterfly

Posted on Thursday, Nov 29th

I have covered Shutterfly (Nasdaq: SFLY) a few times here already. I have had my eye on the company for a while, and have pegged it as an acquisition target for Yahoo, especially. Last week, amidst market doldrums, I managed to pick up a chunk of SFLY at a good price, and have already seen

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Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, Oct 17th

There are 5.2 million small businesses registered with the IRS who have 20 employees or fewer. This is obviously a tremendous market which has largely remained untapped and ignored. SM: How would you define the portion of the small business market that Intuit was focusing on? Was it under 100 employees, or under 1,000 employees?

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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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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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Facebook’s Monetization Strategy (Part 2)

Posted on Thursday, Jul 26th

I would, personally, like to see them dominate not only Online Jobs, but also Online Photo Sharing. News Corp recently bought Photobucket as one of MySpace’s Monetization efforts. Photo sharing is one of the top segments and in the US the top 10 photo sharing sites draws around 50 million visitors each month. I have

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