I’ve started reading the Seattle 2.0 blog a little more regularly, especially now that people that I know and am friends with seem to be writing the bylines on a fairly regular basis.
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to add the site to my blogroll for a while. And this article written by the Alliance of Angels’ Rebecca Lovell is a good reason to send people over to check out the site. Let me know if you disagree with any of Rebecca’s points.
Does this make me want to buy a bunk bed? Maybe not. But did it introduce me to a url I had never heard of before? Yes. And am I forwarding said url around to others who might want to buy a bunk bed? Apparently so.
But check out this fun and easy game from Bunkbeds.net.
1 minute, 28 seconds
I encourage everyone to take a quick trip over to Qvisory.com,.a extremely socially conscious and responsible project headed up by Eileen Quigley, the former head of RealNetworks’ philanthropic arm, RealImpact.
Dubbed, “Tools for life, ” the site helps young people (and old ones too) achieve their work, money and life goals. Here’s what they said in a recent email:
Our mission is to help young people build their economic future and
gain more control over their lives. Today’s 18 to 34 year-olds face
significant challenges in our evolving economy. We’re providing them
with information and tools to help manage and meet their money, work,
and health goals. And we’re advocating for change to ensure that their
voice is heard in Washington, DC, in board rooms, and in state capitols.
I have long been an advocate of our school system shifting gears and actually teaching things that people need to know – little things like how credit card companies make money, how to fill out tax forms, why interest only mortgages are a bad idea, what happens if you eat fast food and chips every day, etc….So, I think this is a great project. Check it out and let me know what you think.
So, just when you thought Scrabulous was dead…..when you thought they had no letters left to play, the team of Rajat and Jayant came back with “Quartzite” for a Bingo Triple Word Score.
It seemed like the war was over when the guys behind Scrabulous bowed to the legal pressure from Hasbro and pulled their wildly successful application from Facebook. I stated that I hoped Hasbro would simply pay the guys what the game was worth and buy the application – and the users – from them.
But instead, the tables have been turned and the guys from Hasbro must have the same look as the Seattle City Council Members who were shocked that Clay Bennett was moving the Sonics.
In a Kasparov-ish type move, the Scrabulous guys have relaunched Scrabulous as “Wordscraper.” Now at first look, the board and the game sucks. Then you look at the rules, and you see that in Wordscraper, you have the ability to create your own board. You can create ANY TYPE of board you want. Maybe you want 20 Triple word score spots. Or…….maybe you want the board to look just like a real Scrabble board…….In just a few minutes, if I wanted, I could make a board that looked like a real Scrabble board and use that for every game moving forward.
This my friends, is what it looks like when 2 smart guys take a winnable battle against a board room full of people without a creative thought in their head. Congrats to the Scrabulous – I mean Wordscraper – guys who just played the death blow in this silly Facebook battle vs Hasbro.
Bonanzle, a young and exciting company we recently started working with, just received a fantastic review from Ecommerce-Guide.com.
An alternative to Craiglist and Ebay, Bonanzle is designed to make it easier for people to buy and sell products online. Given the state and direction of the economy today, any way to make it easier to move used merchandise is positioned to do well. Some choice quotes from the article:
“You get Bonanzle
— an eBay alternative that is quite simply, the best I’ve seen in my
four years of reviewing and writing about start-up marketplaces aimed
at taking sellers away from eBay.”
The Bonanzle platform was designed in-house from
the ground up, so not only does the site look very different from other
alternative sites, but this is the reason why the tools and features on
this site are so radically different.The best way to experience Bonanzle is simply to log
on and try it. What you will find is that Harding and his team of
self-titled “action-minded experts” have managed to offer sellers more
features in this one site than any alternative to date, yet keep the
entire site and selling process simple, compact and super-easy to use.
Check out the whole article, and please Digg it or add it to Delicious if you would be so kind.
Seattle Craigslist is a favorite place for millions of people to buy and sell used items online. As they say in their tagline, Seattle Craigslist “provides local classifieds and forums for jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events.”
I’ve recently come across an alternative to Seattle Craigslist, at www.bonanzle.com. (Full Disclosure – I like their idea so much, I am helping them with some marketing.)
While Seattle Craigslist is simply a text based classifieds section, Bonanzle is built on Ruby on Rails, and offers easy image upload, advanced communications between buyers and sellers, easier ways to create stores, and a host of other useful features.
So if you use Seattle Craigslist, and are looking for an alternative with more bells and whistles, check out Bonanzle, and let me know what you think.
Seattle Craigslist Alternative Bonanzle
So how much are 2,200 women bloggers worth? According to NBC, about 5 Million Bucks in Series B investment, which nets out to close to $2300 per blogger.
The deal includes the following:
As part of the arrangement, iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content, while BlogHer’s network is expected to return the favor to varying degrees.
Reaching out to the BlogHer Network has been a common strategy of start-ups who don’t have $5,000, much less $5,000,000 for marketing. The "Mommy Blogger," which as a term delights and disgusts different people, is an incredibly powerful evangelist for certain product groups. The process involved digging through the network, finding the right email address, crafting a perfect message, sending an email, and praying. If it works, you get free promotion. if it doesn’t, you burned a few hours.
But now it will be interesting to see what kind of influence the NBC buy-in will have on this network. For one thing, I don’t know how much each individual blogger gets from this deal, but I assume it’s a negligble %. It will also be interesting to see what happens to bloggers in the network if they rip on NBC programming, or promote programming of other networks.
Regardless, it’s a nice acknowledgment that the BlogHer network has become a powerful piece of the social media matrix. Congrats on the investment.
I found these interviews with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg & Mark Zuckerberg at FaceReviews.com. The interview was part of the All Things D Conference.
Very interesting interview that runs through the Facebook goals and vision, some insight into what they thought was important as they went from a 3 man side project to Media powerhouse, how FB applications will evolve, and some looks to the future.
One of my favorite things over the past four years has been the UW Business Plan Competition. As a grad student, in 2005, I had two ideas and we went nowhere. In 2006, I jumped on another student team and we won "Best Consumer Product." Last year, I was a first round judge and merely observed the rest. And this year, thanks to the kindness of some of my favorite people, I was invited to judge the tradeshow round.
Quick moment of clarification for those who don’t know anything about this. Every year, about 60-80 teams submit a business plan. Some teams are made up of 4 students, some teams are established companies with a student consultant. It’s a broad range, so you see a lot of neat ideas. These 60-80 teams are whittled down to 32, who then fill a room and pitch their idea to about 100 judges in a tradeshow type setting. That list gets cut down to 16, then down to 4, and a winner is chosen. So, Wednesday, we had the tradeshow round of 32, and our job as judges was to "invest" 1000 fake dollars into at least 5 companies. You are free to split that 1000 however you like, as long as 5 or more companies are given money. The 16 teams who receive the most money move on to the next round.
Now, my favorite part about this whole competition is that since most of the people you talk to are undergrad, MBA or PhD students, they still have this sense of optimism and naivety. For example, you ask an undergrad with a dream, "What’s your exit strategy?" and his response is pure and good. He says, "Exit? We’re going to make this a profitable business. I don’t want to sell it. This is my idea, and it’s going to work." Wow, as a human being, you love hearing that. But then you have to crush his hopes and dreams, and invite him to join the real world. You have to tell him, "Well, here’s the thing. If I’m a VC, and I put money in, there better damn sure be an exit. Because I’m not really in the business of giving you a bunch of coin so you can build a company that doesn’t make me rich. You will sell, and you will sell when I tell you to."
Anyway, the whole thing is great. Wide eyed, naive students getting creative and coming up with some crazy cool ideas. It’s the kind of place that you walk out of wishing they all would get the money they need to build the product they want to build. Sure, there were some plain dumb ideas – but only dumb from the standpoint that they were unfundable. Every idea itself had merit. Even the ideas with terrible business plans and execution were at least interesting ideas.
I’m being lazy and not going through the whole list of companies. But here were some ideas that stood out for me. I’m not saying all their business plans were great, but the ideas stuck in my head
Congrats to all the teams who made it to the next round. And I hope those teams that didnt make it, continue to tweak their plans and shoot for success.
Here’s a neat little web site that you can get lost in for a few hours if you aren’t careful.
KillerStartups.com says they review 30+ sites a day, so that database gets pretty big pretty quickly. The site prolies a wide range of companies, from the goofy to the geeky, and they mostly accentuate the positive. After all, no start-up isperfect, but you have to root for someone willing to throw it all out on the line like that. Plus, it doesn’t look like you need a +$10k a month PR firm, work at a VC firm or be a close friend of Michael Arrington to be profiled on KillerStartups.com, so it’s almost like the "anti-TechCrunch."