LinkedIn is one of those rare Web 2.0 companies - it has a business model (sponsorships, subscriptions, advertising) and it’s profitable, it’s become a highly useful tool for more than nine million users, and built a loyal following given all the LinkedIn requests that hit my in-box. So, it’s no surprise the company has raised $11.8 million of venture capital. As much these VC deals are interesting, I’m waiting for the first tranche of Web 2.0 IPOs to hit the market to see if anyone has the chutzpah to actually do an offering. Then again, why go through all the effort if someone’s going to make the liquidation a snap by making a lucrative acquisition offer.
Update: The service is still not publicly available and is protected right now. Don’t try your Gizmo username or password - this is a seperate combo, which only company officials are privy to. More updates to follow.
SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo Project has introduced a new product, Gizmo Call that make is fairly simple to make VoIP calls from any browser that can support Adobe’s Flash.
From a usability standpoint, this one gets a big thumbs up from me. After installing this tiny plugin, you are given a screen that is pretty much a Flash-based replica of the Gizmo Project soft client. (More on Flash & VoIP.)
The client auto configures your system, and uses the built in audio and video hardware of a computer to make phones calls. It easily found my Plantronics bluetooth headset, and used the MacBook Pro’s internal video camera for video calling.
You can call anyone who has either a Google Talk client or a Gizmo ID. Of course you can connect to PSTN numbers as well, by typing in the number you wish to connect to. Gizmo has also created a little embeddeable link which you can copy and paste in your blog, or on your MySpace page. People can call you by clicking on that button. You can embed the link in your emails as well. Its like SkypeMe, except you don’t need to launch a new application, but instead you use the web browser.
By launching this new browser based calling service, SIPphone is ensuring that it is staying current with newer rivals such as Jajah, Jaxtr, Wengo(Disclosure: Wengo is an advertiser on GigaOM Network) who are using widgets to popularize their services.
With no desktop client software to download, Gizmo & SIPphone are betting that there will be further interest in their low cost phone service. While my mother is grateful for these low cost services, I still remain skeptical of a business model that is reliant on low price as a business tool.
We don’t usually write about parties, but the Wellsphere launch this weekend was a fun one. Held at the Mission Cliffs climbing gym in San Francisco, the bash was lively and well-attended, as you can see in the somewhat intelligible video interview with Wellsphere CEO Ron Gutman embedded below the jump.
So what’s Wellsphere? It’s a wellness — fitness and healthy eating, mostly — -oriented social network, opening to the public today. The core idea is for it to be a resource as well as prompt for finding gyms, restaurants, and activities, focusing on positive encouragement rather than avoidance of sickness and obesity.
Wellphere’s informational index will be amplified by its members, who offer advice and connect to each other to arrange activities and help motivate each other to uphold workout resolutions. I brought along some muggle friends to the party and they actually seemed pretty excited about the idea.
I think the site could do with increased capability for users to edit its core resources rather than pushing their participation over to personal profiles and blogs. However, encouraging social activity among Wellsphere members is even more important. All Yahoo has to do is better localize a its health vertical and then what have you got.
San Francisco-based Wellsphere has raised an angel round as well as a Series A from investors including Gemini Israel Funds and healthcare management guru Woodrow Myers, but Gutman would only describe the total amount raised as “a few million dollars.” The 14-person company emerged from a multidisciplinary group at Stanford.
While low prices and huge inventory are the main attraction at Amazon.com, the site’s reviews have emerged as an essential online resource. Now, a new generation of start-ups wants to take on the shopping giant by spreading reviews across the web.
As PowerReviews CEO Andy Chen puts it, he’s building a “next-generation Epinions.” His competitors in the distributed reviews space include Bazaarvoice and European-oriented Reevoo. Today, a new start-up, Ratepoint, is throwing its hat in the ring.
Boston-based RatePoint has raised a little over $1 million from Prism VentureWorks, .406 Ventures, and its founders, who were part of the team at GeoTrust, which they sold to VeriSign in September.
The start-up has gone from concept to launch in four months, an impressive feat — but then again, that might just show how wide open this category is. RatePoint makes a toolbar (as of Sunday night, only available for Internet Explorer) that aggregates user ratings. Toolbar users will see reviews weighted to emphasize other users with similar tastes.
“A five star for me is not always a five star for you, it might be a three star,” explains founder Chris Bailey. For now, the user reviews are only of URLs, so the tool the service most closely resembles is probably StumbleUpon. Product reviews are in the works.
PowerReviews, which has $6.25 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Draper Richards, and company founders, is taking a slightly different approach, though its earthy green and cutesy star design is pretty similar to RatePoint’s. We’re pretty sure PowerReviews came first.
The company offers review software and management for retailer web sites — for instance, Walgreens — and distributes the reviews across its 80 customer sites, taking a cut of ad and product sales. Its staff of 18 does a diligent job of quality control.
Until now, PowerReviews’ reviews have only been available on customer sites, but the company plans to launch a portal in the next few months. Since the review templates are extremely specific, the portal will provide some interesting side-by-side and tag-based comparisons. It will also expand a revenue stream of sponsored listings (though sponsorship does not affect search ranking, says Chen).
I saw an early version and liked it, though I felt like the site could really benefit from being mashed up with price comparison, local availability, and color tools. How many shopping web sites are you going to go to that don’t actually sell products?
Both companies’ ideas are interesting, but my hesitance towards installing yet another toolbar makes me prefer PowerReviews’ approach. Reevoo uses primarily email surveys (to ensure customers have actually bought a product), which also seems a little too onerous.
By staying focused on reviews, the companies are ensuring that they always stay relevant to consumers. However, they’ll only become useful — and profitable — when they elicit a whole lot of participation. Amazon may be in need of some competition on the reviews front, but it’ll be hard for any site to emerge from the pack.
LinkedIn … now here is a company, that came to the social networking trend early, stayed focused on the business market, and now is well on its way to clock $100 million in revenues. It has just crossed the profitability threshold and is making money pretty much every which way it can.
A valuation of $250 million is being put on the company … and yet it goes ahead and raises almost $13 million in fresh venture funding, and no one asks the question: why? Why does it need fresh capital from Bessemer Ventures and European Founders Fund?
Somehow I don’t buy the “new product experiment” argument made by Keith Rabois, LinkedIn’s VP for corporate and business development. Time to give Reid Hoffman a call, and ask for myself.
Update: Reid Hoffman has left a long response to what LinkedIn is going to do with the money in the comments. Here is a quick link, if you want to understand where LI is going.
There was no mention of the word “broadband” in the President’s State of the Union address last week, an omission of little surprise given everything else that’s going on. Still, it may have been tacit acknowledgment that yet another Bush administration campaign goal — universal broadband access by 2007 — will fall by the wayside.
Granted, the President and the nation should focus first on pressing matters like wars and health care. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK for U.S. politicians to ignore this country’s broadband infrastructure. In fact, without political leadership and national-goal objectives, the current dismal state of American broadband penetration isn’t going to get better soon. The combination of archaic regulations, big monopoly service providers and the perform-now mentality of Wall Street simply won’t allow for any risky experimentation or network buildout that doesn’t have fast, demonstrable ROI. So we need politicians to take charge.
Already, you see such leadership happening on a local level, with municipalities and even some states drafting their own broadband plans, usually revolving around wireless (because wireless technologies offer the attractive if unproven idea of circumnavigating the telco infrastructure to deploy faster technologies more quickly). Maybe starting locally is the best way to go, since experiments can happen faster and more methods can be tested. Given the current President’s preoccupation with weighter matters like Iraq, and the current apparent unwillingness in Congress to take on big-picture telecom reform in 2007, local experiments may be all we have for the near-term future.
Leaving broadband build outs to the big telcos and cablecos — an idea that probably passes as strategy for the current administration — isn’t going to get us to ubiquitous broadband anytime soon. Both Verizon and AT&T are struggling to bring their networks up to speed, and are likely to focus on providing services to high-paying customers first to satisfy Wall Street.
As long as there aren’t too many more Katrina situtations to expose the underlying fragility of their networks, the telcos and their armies of lobbyists and lawyers should be able to stand their ground under the current byzantine structure of telecom laws, moving forward on a timetable that benefits their shareholders first. That’s as it should be for any public company worth its market cap. But is it good policy for all?
In the meantime what’s not happening is anyone building new networks on a national basis for the greater good. Rich folks with disposable incomes should have no problems. The worry should be about the classrooms and homes of mainstream America, and whether or not broadband will allow everyone a chance to participate or prepare for the digital economy of the future.
We are headed for problems as a nation if the best thinking that comes out of Davos is that YouTube is going to pay for videos, or that Bill Gates thinks the Internet will give us better TV. Now that politicians are finding the Internet as a communications vehicle, they should focus a bit on the medium as well as the message. Because it needs their help.
Wordpress boss Matt Mullenweg believes spam is one of the blogosphere’s biggest threats but another increasingly troubling issue is plagiarism. We’re not talking about people taking the ideas of other bloggers but outright theft of entire posts or passages. A recent example is The Client Side, which had its posts ripped off without attribution or even a hat tip by Scott Kress, an experienced blogger who should know better. Over the weekend, several b5 bloggers noticed a blog called All Women Talk is using other people’s content without permission.
Within the media, plagiarists are treated like vermin and quickly ostracized. In the blogopshere, it seems many people are still trying to get their heads around plagiarism. On one hand, it can be somewhat flattering to have your content “borrowed” by someone else because it suggests what you’re writing is interesting. Many blogs using your content will try to get around it by linking back to your blog or giving you credit.
After awhile, you begin to realize you’re doing all the work while someone else is reaping the benefits (readership, traffic, advertising revenue) by scraping your content. Why should someone ever visit your blog if they can read it somewhere else? You soon realize the linkbacks are insincere tokens of thanks. Rather than giving you some props/credit, they’re a cheap and inadequate way of asking for permission.
So what can you do if another blogger is ripping off your work? You can start with a friendly comment or e-mail, suggesting that while you’re flattered by the attention, it would be better if they put together their own thoughts on a particular topic while citing the blog where they got the idea. If that doesn’t work, a harsher e-mail or a post on your blog outing the plagiarist may be the next move. In extreme cases, you can use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, (DMCA) to compel people to take down seen to be infringing on copyrighted content.
For more information on plagiarism, check out Plagiarism Today, a blog that looks at plagiarism, content theft and copyright issues.
Featuring one of the best headlines I’ve seen in a long time - “Is that your cellphone in your pocket…?”, the National Post had a story a couple days ago about wireless carrier Telus quietly offering downloads of pornographic photos and videos for about $3 or $4 a shot You’ve got to love the explanation from Telus spokesman Jim Johannson, who said since porn is already widely available on mobile browsers, the carrier has “introduced — in a very responsible way — adult content that’s in behind proper age verification and that’s compliant with provincial standards and regulations.”
Ha! I guess that makes it alright. What Johannson should have said is: “Like any ARPU-hungry carrier, we’re looking for new ways to enhance wireless data revenue. Clearly, porn is a lucrative online business so it’s a no-brainer to serve consumers who want a mobile fix”. According to the Post, the North American mobile phone users spent $400-million on adult photos and video last year. No one should overlook the fact the porn industry is always on the bleeding edge of technology - be it VCRs, e-commerce, streaming video, DVDs and, now, wireless.
You can visit Gizmocall.com, and you are prompted to download a small plugin, which is available for both Windows and Mac computers. 
