Bambi Francisco

Seesmic expands video comments with Disqus

Pretty soon, video commenting will be a requisite feature on traditional media sites. And, Seesmic - in partnership with Disqus - hopes to be that underlying platform. 

Seesmic, a video Twitter with aspirations to be a 'worldwide talkshow in video, and Disqus, a hoster and aggregator of comments across blogs, are partnering in Seesmic's effort to be the video commenting platform across publishing sites. Disqus, a two-person team co-founded by Daniel Ha last year, hosts comments for 13,000 blogs, including my personal Bambi.blogs, as of yesterday. (Thanks Daniel for helping set that up on TypePad).   

It's a good partnership as Seesmic, which has $6 million in funding from some high-profile angels, like Ron Conway, seeks to ramp up its user base, which now stands at 15,000. As Seesmic CEO and founder Loic Le Meur will tell you himself, at this point, it's all about getting users, users, users! He's determined to reach 1 million, though he won't commit to a date he thinks he'll reach that milestone. (Watch Loic's Seesmic pitch in this video.) 

Given that the site is invite-only, once he opens it up officially in mid-June, I'm sure the adoption rate will accelerate, especially with partners like Disqus. By partnering with Disqus, all of Disqus members will automatically be part of Seesmic. That could be 100,000 new users immediately. Daniel says that he has an active commentator base of 100,000. An active user is someone who comments in the past seven days. Moreover, Disqus' approach to getting new users is pretty clever. Partner with the most active blogs that generate dialogue and claim users commenting as your own.

Read the rest of the article on Vator.tv

Zivity - You know it when you see it

Capturing the female body in an artistic form can be tricky. The subtlest of adjustments can move a piece from inspirational to offensive. The former attracts a female audience, the latter – more likely males. Zivity wants to attract both, raising questions as to whether men and women, when dealing with “art” that dallies in moral obscurity, really want the same thing.

Seems to me that there is a reason that men read Playboy, women read Cosmo, and men read Playgirl. Essentially, men tend to like photos that help them get right to point while women generally like photos to show them how to be beautiful. Plus, women like to spend a bit more time on the experience. Zivity may have its work cut out for itself trying to please both.

If Zivity slips to the wrong side of that fine line between smut and beauty, it risks losing the female audience. And, it'll be pretty obvious if it does slip. As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart prophetically stated about obscenity vs. art “I know it when I see it.”

Zivity is a new experience oriented, subscription site for females to share risqué, provocative and sometimes nude photos. It’s attracted about 100 amateur female models, including Zivity’s founder Cyan Banister, as well as Bella Sioux and Doll (both can be seen in Zivity’s Vator profile). Many of the models bare it all, though Zivity keeps the ratio of nude to non-nude to 50%, said Cyan in her interview with me.

(Go to Vator.tv to read the entire piece.)

 

Vator Box opens the kimono (Zivity, 23andMe)

This week, the theme on Vator Box is transparency. We look at two women-started social networking sites that reveal who we are at some core level. The first one is Zivity, a $7-million-funded company that founder Cyan Banister describes in her video pitch as a beauty site that "sits at the intersection of MySpace, Playboy and American Idol and Playboy." This is not your mother's iVillage. We also looked at 23andMe, a personal genomics company with $10 million in funding from Genentech and Google, that hopes to create social networks around a person's haplotype. (Watch interview with 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey in 23andMe ushers in social 'DNA' networks.)

The high-profile startup lets people get access to their genetic information and learn their predispositions for health conditions, or get a better understanding of their ancestry and traits. Our guest host and Simon Cowell for this segment was Deva Hazarika, founder of enterprise software company ClearContext. Even though Deva applied 27 times and has been rejected for the Zivity beta program, he still gave worthwhile observations, like this one: "What we can do is use the genomic social network to get the early indicators of who's going to be able to be on Zivity later."

In all seriousness, the conversation around Zivity really zeroed in on whether the site - with 50% of all photos being in the nude - could maintain a level of integrity and standards around high-brow, tastefully-shot females. The jury is still out. To that end, it was unclear to us just how Zivity reaches its goal of having 100,000 subscribers paying $10 a month for a subscription. But one thing was agreed upon, it's pretty clear that most sites that show a little flesh are probably going to be popular businesses.

We then spent some time on 23andMe, one of the up-and-coming companies in the personal genomics field that competes with Navigenics. (Watch my interview with Navigenics CEO Mari Baker).

Even though we dove into the concerns around privacy and discrimination and health care, the big question for us was how much genetic testing improves people's health. Studies are mixed. One study on smokers conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center found that "giving smokers information about their genetic risk of lung cancer upped the motivation to quit -- but a year afterward, they were not more likely to quit smoking than people who received counseling," according to a Los Angeles Times article. Another study at Boston University tested people for Alzheimer's. According to the same article, people who were tested for high risk for Alzheimer's changed their behavior in favor of a healthier lifestyle, but it was unclear if that change in behavior could ultimately prevent the disease. We were mixed on the price point. Deva thought $1,000 was minimal for the information. Ezra and I were skeptical about whether that fee was low enough for the average person to pay. 

Overall, we liked both companies. 

Slide's Max Levchin on making money in social media

Social networking is undoubtedly a ubiquitous feature of our online lives. But whether these platforms can make a lot of money is a big question. To this end, the business models of widgets - Slide, Flixster, iLike, RockYou - built atop of these “social graphs” seem somewhat tenuous.

Max Levchin knows this all too well. He recently raised  $50 million for what many consider to be a widget company. That company – Slide – now has a market valuation of half-a-billion. With such a high bar, comes hard work. Max’s mission over the next year or two – besides continually finding more ways to iterate upon Slide’s popular SuperPoke -- is to get profitable. If Slide isn’t making money in a couple years, as Max puts it: “I’m really screwing it up.”

Before jumping into the “making money” question, first a refresher on what Slide is. Slide is a place where 18-to-34 year olds hang out and express themselves with photos and videos. It was only after Slide made an application on Facebook that it grew like a weed, much like the other popular Facebook apps, Flixster and iLike.

“So, how does Slide make money?” I asked, in this recent interview in the Vator studios.

Slide primarily makes money through advertising, though users also feel that to SuperPoke someone is worth paying some money for, said Max. SuperPoke is an offshoot of Facebook’s “poke” concept that allows someone to send another person a communication without actually communicating at all. Much like a poke in real life. It doesn’t mean anything. It just gets your attention. SuperPoke builds upon a poke by making the gestures more expressive, like a slap or hug, and adding icons. Think of SuperPokes as virtual Hallmark cards or fancier emoticons  - those fun yellow smiley faces on our IM. 

Max wouldn’t get too in-depth about the business model of Slide. But he did say that he needs to understand the world of Madison Avenue better. Indeed, he should. After all, without convincing Madison Ave. to consistently embrace new media companies like Slide, it may be difficult for Max to convince Wall Street that Slide is worth taking public. This exit - which is rather ambitiuous in this market-meltdown environment - is seemingly something Max is gunning for.

“It was a pretty zesty affair,” said Max to me in a recent interview in the Vator studios. Max was referring to the time PayPal, a company he co-founded, went public back in February 2002, and was sold within six months to eBay for $1.5 billion. "I wouldn't mind doing it again."

(Note: This is the first of a two-part series with Max Levchin. The next interview will be on the evolution of online expression).

Vator Box on voyeurism and brand control

We're back again with Drew Curtis of Fark.com fame. This time we looked at fast-growing FriendFeed, and the appetite for voyeurism and socially-produced content. We then look at Gorilla Spot, which lets consumers create video ad mashups. The company competes with MixerCast and Genius Rocket, and is part of the booming, video-ad-solutions industry drawing up-and-comers like ScanScout, BrightRoll, Digitalsmiths, VideoEgg for publishers, and HotPluto, Spotzer and Turnhere - video solutions for small businesses. advertising. Finally, we look at file-backup company Carbonite. It has nothing to do with the other two companies we looked. But it's a company with real revenue and a real value proposition. 

Let’s start with FriendFeed, an easy-to-use service that lets you see the content across the Web that your friends or people who randomly end up in your network are using. The content comes from services, like Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr, Netflix Queue and Google's YouTube. (Read and watch my interview and analysis of FriendFeed with Paul Buccheit, FriendFeed founder.)

Ezra Roizen – Vator Box regular guest – raised the point that it’s unclear what the demand is for other people’s “dribble,” though clearly it’s a fascination among those who Twitter and use Seesmic, a video Twitter.

Drew said that as a whole, socially-collected content and contributing commentary around them generate a lot of pageviews, but the “actual product sucks.” 

Indeed, FriendFeed’s traffic has exploded since March, according to Alexa. But much of the content shared (including some from yours truly) and comments offered belong on the editing floor, and definitely have a short lifespan. As Drew pointed out in a separate interview I had with him, of the 2,000 articles posted each day on Fark, only about 100 are deemed worthy of being showcased by the Fark moderators.

Now, Ezra did point out that there is value in creating “discussion around content” or a “shared experience.” I could not agree more. In a recent interview (to be published next week) with Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin, he tells me that the key to keeping fickle Web users glued to a particular product is to ensure that their content is mixed with other content that is not theirs.

In other words, a person can and will easily move his/her own scrapbook-like content from one social network to another. But if he/she cannot take the contributions of others, they’re more likely to stay put.

Indeed, I have had profiles on Tribe, Friendster, MySpace, and on social-activity sites, such as Kaboodle and Plum. I’ve not stuck around. I just moved onto the next site that lets me create a presence. There are no switching costs, besides lost photos (but given the abundance of such photos, I'm hardly emotionally attached to any digital content I've collected in the past. I'll just make new memories.)

But - to Max's and Ezra's point - in time, if my content mixed with others creates something even more valuable, and if I can’t take that finished or ongoing product with me, then I’d more likely stick around. Social-activity sites aren’t something to sneeze at. Soical-shopping site Kaboodle was purchased for $30 million by Hearst in August 2007. I remember when Kaboodle was valued at $9 million in 2006. (Full disclosure: Paul Buchheit is an investor in Vator.)

Speaking of mixed content, social sharing and mashups, Gorillaspot is a company that lets marketers involve their fans or customers in the promotion of products. In the Gorillaspot video pitch, you can see how Viacom’s Paramount Pictures used Gorillaspot to promote Sweeney Todd.  According to Athan Stephanopoulous, the company’s founder and CEO, those participating in the Sweeney Todd campaign spent an average of 30 minutes editing the movie trailer. I can definitely see this happening. Ezra's son Tanner spends about 30 minutes or more creating scrapbooks of Star Wars characters. I wouldn't doubt that the next step for him is editing an entire video.

But the challenge for such user-generated advertising services is getting marketers/advertisers comfortable with the unpredictable personal touches that can hurt brands. Advertisers are "scared to death," said Drew, who talked about a campaign he held on Fark. "You can't stop anyone from putting a big giant P.. (bleep)" on an ad, he said. "How do you get around that?" I asked.

"You don't," he responded. "It's a flawed concept."

The upshot is if consumers know that what they're viewing is a "derivative" product, a brand may not be tarnished regardless of the mixed content. You'll have to watch the video for our collective thoughts on user-generated ads.

Finally, we looked at Carbonite. Hands down, this company is worth taking a look at. It's not a cutting-edge,  sexy idea or business. But it makes money and it's growing fast.

Vator Reports on the changing advertising landscape

Vator.tv’s new managing editor John Shinal and I highlight the rapidly changing online marketing and advertising industry. In our new 'Vator Innovation Minute' John zooms in on online reputation management. Featured in this episode are the following companies we found on Vator.tv: Visible Technologies, Buzzlogic, Videoegg, Outerjoin, AdKrakr and Genius.com. [in the context of online reputation management specifically you may also want to check out the company Rapleaf]. To check out our upcoming Demand Media/Vator.tv Competition seeking the next big media company click here. Enjoy the show and see you on Vator.tv!

Vator Reports on discovery tools across the Web

This episode of the Vator Reports is all about online discovery. Tony Perkins and I discuss the different approaches that new Internet ventures follow in providing contextually relevant information to their users. Highlighted in this episode are the founders of the following companies many of which have the potential to define the future of Internet discovery: Wize, Aggregate Knowledge, Flixster, ThisNext, HailCab, Spotplex and Sphere.
Bambi’s 1:1 interviews with the founders of Aggregate Knowledge, Flixster, Wize, Spotplex and Sphere can be found here: Aggregate Knowledge/Flixster, Wize, Spotplex, Sphere. Enjoy the show and see you on Vator.tv!

Ross Levinsohn on Web trends, Velocity

Two big Web luminaries - Ross Levinsohn, who was Fox Interactive Media President at the time News Corp bought MySpace, and Jonathan Miller, who was AOL CEO when the Internet company bought Advertising.com -- have finally revealed their new venture - Velocity Investmet Group. As Ross tells me in this interview, he and John knew each other for the last 15 years. They realized that they "agree on most things" about the Internet and, in fact, competed for acquisitions while they were both at their respective companies. As luck would have it, they both left their companies within two days of one another and thus began brainstorming for the last five months. Both worked on various ideas, including the idea to raise funds for their own venture. In the end, being advisers to deep-pocketed General Atlantic was the way to go. (Go to Vator.tv for more of the story.)

Calling all female entrepreneurs!

On August 1, 2007, SF New Tech Meetup is holding an event for female entrepreneurs. The gathering will be held at the Metreon in San Francisco, CA. There will be five or six women presenting, including yours truly. I'll be demonstrating Vator.tv, the online venue for innovation and innovators. For those who don't know Vator.tv, it's a place where anyone from around the world can pitch their idea and be discovered by like-minded innovators or investors or service providers who can help build that idea. It's also a place to discover ideas, collaborate and exchange knowledge. That's my brief pitch. But check out Myles Weissleder's Vator pitch on his conference.

Dealmaker pitches Under the Radar

This coming Thursday, the 10th Under the Radar conference will be held. There will be 40 startups presenting. I'm excited that Dealmaker used Vator.tv to pitch its conference. Watch Dealmaker's president, Alison Murdock, give her pitch here or go to www.vator.tv.

On social networks

Catch the latest episode of Vator Reports - the show on innovation. This one highlights the innovators who've created social networks and whose pitches are on Vator.tv.

Coming soon

Richard Rosenblatt, former Chairman of MySpace, is one of Vator.tv's investors. Andy Plesser, who's video blogging at Beet.tv, reported it today. Check out Beet.tv and AlwaysOn for the stories. The reason I mention this on my blog is because the new Vator.tv site will launch in a couple weeks. It's quite a transformation from my original garage project. The site that is currently live was just a platform to hold the video pitches.

Vator.tv isn't just about matching entrepreneurs with investors. Vator.tv is a catalyst for innovation.

Innovators often lead quiet lives of desperation. Finding value-aded collaborators, expertise and resources in an efficient fashion is more often than not an insurmountable hurdle to innovation. With greater efficiency, the innovation market could be far larger than it is today. That's what I hope Vator.tv will do for all those with great ideas.

Stay tuned.

GPS-guided car

Check out the new video on Vator.tv - the destination for all ideas. If you want to upload your idea or company, go to vator.tv

The world is a mashup

MixerCast launched on Tuesday in public alpha. The very sleek site is designed to allow anyone to take content from their desktops and across the Internet and mash them up to create their own visual collages of sorts. But here’s a twist. Users can get paid for their work by choosing which advertisements they want displayed on their creations. While mash-ups aren’t new, certainly, mashing up advertisements advances this whole notion of taking control of the viewing experience.     Leading the startup is Jennifer Cooper, who ran Yahoo Platinum and oversaw Yahoo Broadband, and has apparently mashed up her experiences with Adarbad Master, an engineer who created the service, after receiving $2.6 million from ComVentures back in December 2005. Cooper came on board 90 days ago to help build a company from Master’s technology. At this point, the 28-person team is seeking a B round of funding in the $5-$7 million range. MixerCast is as its name implies. Just as DJs mix music, MixerCast allows people to mix content to create their own broadcasts.  Cooper showed me her little news broadcast she created with content from ABC News, one of MixerCast’s content partners. All told, MixerCast has half a dozen partnerships with media properties, including National Geographic and Getty Images.  The business model is mainly advertising. In the case of ABC News, MixerCast will get 30% to 40% of ad revenue for views generated on its site. MixerCast will also try to get media companies to sponsor templates, such as ABC News has done. MixerCast will also try to get companies to place products in the templates.  Other sources of sales include affiliate marketing, in which MixerCast gets referral fees from Amazon.com or Apple’s iTunes for any customers it sends to those outlets. Go to vator.tv to make your pitch.

Eurekster raises $5.5 mln

Congratulations to Eurekster. On Tuesday, the company is set to announce that it closed its Series B round of financing. Eurekster raised $5.5 million in its first institutional round of funding from Technology Venture Partners of Australia, Transcosmos Investments of Japan, and its private investors who were part of the company's A round. By the sounds of its investors, it's obvious that the San Francisco-based company is going global. And, that is exactly Eurekster's intention now that it has new funds. Eurekster is one of the early providers of social search, which is basically search based on audience behavior. Essentially, Eurekster's technology allows publishers to provide better search results to their audience by analyzing click-stream analysis of the audience. The idea is that the audience provides another layer of vetting and ranking of results that algorithms cannot do. I interviewed Steven in the past, and from our past conversations and his demo, I have to say the service could be quite useful for niche publishers who want search rankings to be based on what their audience or experts within that audience find to be most relevant for particular keywords. The theory is that the audience of a particular niche site should be far more astute about choosing which pages are the most relevant for a given search than other ranking systems, such as freshness. Here's a hypothetical: If someone types in "Q1 Google's earnings" into a Swicki (Eurekster's search widget) on a financial news site, the first result would not necessarily be based on date and time, but the article that the most number of people read. Theoretically, the fact that more people read one particular report over another would suggest that one is more relevant than the other. It's a good service. I've had a Swicki (Eurekster's search widget) on my personal blog for more than a year

Vator Reports - the first episode

Check out the first episode of vator reports - a show on innovation, based on the many innovative ideas and businesses Peter Thiel and I are seeing on the vator.tv site. In this episode, some companies highlighted are uShip - the eBay for shipping (and one of my favorite videos on vator!), SnipWiki - a site where engineers can create new software code by collaborating through a wiki, Lotus Video - a maker of vitamin vodkas, Swingstar Golf - an online golf trainer, Crushpad - a Web 2.0 approach to winemaking, and Dogster - a social network site for dogs, among many others. Enjoy the show. And if you go to vator.tv, let me know which video pitches Peter and I should highlight.

What's your Weather-Bill?

Having worked on the COMEX in college, WeatherBill takes me back to those days of hedging risk by buying futures and options of commodities. In the case of WeatherBill, the trading is of weather contracts. It's a great idea. WeatherBill is a way for businesses to hedge their risk against weather. In many ways, it's really a form of insurance against adverse weather. If you're a golf course operator, and want to get paid $3,000 per rainy day (defined by level of precipitation), you could enter that $3k amount in, and WeatherBill will calculate how much that insurance contract costs. Alternatively, if you're a coffee shop owner, you might want to buy weather contracts or insurance against sunny days, because those are the days that draw fewer customers. In the most simple terms, these contracts are then sold to hedge funds who essentially buy the risk away from WeatherBill. WeatherBill plays a bit of an arbitrage game between its clients - those buying the insurance contracts - and the hedge funds.

In this video, WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg talks a bit about his new business, which just went live in mid-January.

(Trivia: Where did the company name come from? -- tune in to these pages, and you'll find out.)

And, if you'd like to provide a pitch of your idea or business, go to www.vator.tv.

Geni's approach to social networking

With the success of MySpace, there has been enormous activity in the startup world focusing on social networks around a particular niche, or purpose. In the case of Geni.com, which launched mid-January, the site attracts anyone interested in genealogy – the study of ancestry or family histories. It is a social network that first starts with one family tree, and then branches out from there. You can imagine that as family trees get filled out, you'll be able to see who your 10th-degree cousin is. You might also learn that your best friend is related by having the same great, great, great, great grandmother.

The viral nature of this site is pretty obvious and compelling. Once someone fills in their family tree, like I did recently, they know exactly what they have to do next. They have to prompt others – parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, in-laws – to fill in their family profiles. To this end, the value proposition seems far greater than other social netwok sites that are trying to get people to post their thoughts, photos and videos on their own personal pages and get their friends or family to connect with them. The problem for those sites are 1) some family members/friends aren't interested in social networks, or they're already part of one 2) there are too many other social networks trying to position themselves as neighborhood or family/close friend networks, such as TypePad's Vox and Friendster, and therefore, it's hard to choose which one to be part of.

Geni.com is interesting because it's a site that organizes your family tree. That's a value-add that other social networks don't provide.

To be sure, Geni.com - though its approach is different -- is actually trying to do the same thing as the other sites. It's trying to connect people. And, on the site, a person can upload their photos, and create profiles, such as favorite cuisines, school and professional history. There's even a place where someone can message me on my Geni.com profile. These are requisite features of social network sites. Now, what I haven't seen is a place to blog. But I imagine it's only a matter of time before this feature is incorporated into Geni.com. After all, once you get your family tree up and running, you'll likely want to communicate with them through stories. Additionally, if people can blog, that means they'll likely stay on the site longer, create content, and drive pageviews. And, since Geni.com is going to be mainly advertising supported, I'd imagine the company will want as many features that drive pageviews.

Now, while I really thinking the viral nature is compelling, it will take a lot of encouragement to get others to respond. For instance, since I pinged my family (nearing two weeks now) to upload their information – their spouse, children, in-laws, etc. – they had yet to fill in any information. But no matter, I’m sure in time they will. It’s a matter of changing their behavior and understanding how easy a family tree can be organized if they just added their 2 cents of knowledge.

Former PayPal COO David Sacks, who also produced “Thank you for Smoking,” based on the popular book (and one of my favorites), founded Geni.com in mid-2006. In this video, he gives his pitch about why he started it and what his vision is.

Nichefication and gay-men sites

BigJock - which launched in November 2006 - announced recently that it's attracted gay men in 60 countries in just 60 days. BigJock is yet another example of the "nichefication" of the Web. BigJock is a social network specifically focused on the gay men community. That's right - no lesbians allowed.

Importantly, its emergence underscores the trend toward free social networking sites around specific niches. The rise of free social networking sites around the gay community is one reason that paid dating sites, like Gay.com, have come under pressure. In late 2006, PlanetOut was downgraded by WR Hambrecht on concerns subscriptions from its subsidiary Gay.com were coming under pressure from free social networking sites. That said, it's unclear just how large a site focusing on gay men (not gay men and women) can get. PlanetOut - a publicly-traded media company focusing on the gay and lesbian community -- is valued at around $85 million in the public market. To get a better understanding of the gay market, I asked BigJock.com founder Richard Rudometkin how big the market is. His response: It is estimated that 10 million gay men reside in the United States , with the gay/lesbian community reaching roughly 16 million. This compares to roughly 12 million Asian-Americans. In addition, per capita gay buying power is approximately $41,000, compared to $33,000 for Asian-Americans, $20,000 for African Americans or $18,000 for Latinos – according to MarketResearch.com. As for the advertising targeting this demographic? The overall gay buying power is an estimated $640 billion for 2006 (Witeck-Combs); this figure reached 70 billion pounds in the UK . It is expected to reach $835 billion in 2011. Buying Power of Gays in Top 15 Metro Markets Totals $310 Billion US Corporate advertisers spent $156 million on the gay-specific media market in 1999 – out of $215 billion spent overall (Rivendell/Universal McCann). This figure grew to $230 million in 2006. The American gay and lesbian community represents a US $47.3 billion travel market, or about 10% of the U.S. travel industry. 175 of the Fortune 500 actively advertised to the gay community in 2006, versus 19 in 1994. (These ads were placed in gay-specific and non-gay-specific publications.)

BigJock.com is one of the contestants gunning to win vator.tv's "Pitch Tim Draper your billion-dollar idea" contest. Go to vator.tv if you want to participate. All you have to do is upload your video pitch.

VatorTV's Pitch Tim Draper contest

Vator.tv's Pitch Tim Draper your billion-dollar idea contest runs through the end of February. The way to participate is to upload your video to vator.tv. Watch Tim's video to learn what he's looking for in a pitch.

ThinkFree is pretty cool

It's taken some time for wikis to be embraced. I know since we used wikis at MarketWatch back in 2001 and no one but me contributed. But six years later - 2007 -- may be the year we'll see a lot of tools to help people collaborate around ideas. ThinkFree is one service that is designed for that purpose. I easily created a presentation (similar to PPT) and a couple word documents. I kept some private, I published one, and I shared others and invited my friends to collaborate on the documents. That's good stuff. ThinkFree has a lot going for it. First of all, it's easy to use, which is the key to success for so many of these new services. The one with the simplest interface is the one that catches on. It also is Web-based. And, it's free up to 1 gigabyte of storage (Suggestion to ThinkFree: expand the storage to 2 gigs for free). It's my bet that Web-based services for document/PPT and wiki-styled collaboration around such documents will be embraced this year.

Pitch DFJ's Tim Draper your idea

Momjunction is the first contestant for the "Pitch Tim Draper your billion-dollar idea" contest, which is being held on vator.tv, a platform for video pitches of all kinds. Momjunction is - as it sounds - focusing on the niche segment of moms, which is actually pretty large. There are over 80 million moms in the U.S. alone, and 32 million of these moms are online, according to eMarketer. Since Momjunction launched on Nov. 1, it's signed on 1,000 members. On Thurdsay, the company said it raised $1.5 million in funding from a number of investors including PointRoll, CEO Christopher Saridakis and founder Jules Gardner, and entrepreneur Pat Croce. Watch Sang Kim, founder and CEO, in the video.

Classifieds in India

If you want to learn about a startup that is trying to be the Craigslist in India, check out the video and meet the team. On a somewhat related note, here's some interesting statistics I found about entrepreneurs and immigrants from India. The research came from US-Indiafriendship.net. Indian immigrants have founded more engineering and technology companies in the US in the past decade (1995-2005) than immigrants from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan combined. Of all immigrant-founded companies, 26% have Indian founders. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Indian scientists and engineers (S&E) in Silicon Valley grew by 646% (while the total foreign-born S&E workforce grew by 246% and the region’s total population of S&E, both native and foreign-born, grew by only 103%). In short, the growth of Indian entrepreneurship reflected the influx of Indian scientists and engineers to the region.Interesting statistic about entrepreneurs and immigrants from India. Want to see more startup videos? Go to www.vator.tv

Swapping instead of shopping

With over three million items, SwapThing helps users swap with folks across town or across the country. This year, the company encourages consumers to go holiday swapping instead of shopping. Through the company's matchmaking technology and user-created communities, it has connected over 18,000 p2p swaps. SwapThing charges $1 per transaction. Check out the video for more about SwapThing from Jessica Hardwick, who talks about why she started SwapThing based on her own swapping experience when her cat was sick. She swapped with a veterinarian, who cared for her cat while Jessica provided accounting services.

Zimbio inspired by Wikipedia

I like the idea and I like the two founders, at least in the video introduction. But there are many companies trying to apply the Wikipedia model across the long tail of topics, Wikipedia notwithstanding. Moreover, Wikipedia founder and wiki-evangelist Jimmy Wales is trying to apply the Wikipedia model across topics through his new venture called Wikia. Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch for my take. Google is also trying to dig into topics with the help of the audience through its Co-op service. And, others -- including search startups - are trying to help people put together the ultimate reference page for any topic with the contribution of everyone on the Web. I call these topical pages - online brochures. Don't get me wrong. Brochures are valuable. I pick them up, or some sort of flyer, all the time when I travel to various places. It's just unclear which of these sites will attract the 1% of active creators to help build out these online brochures. As I said in one of my columns, regarding Plum (read Bambi.blogs.com for that column), most people grow tired of creating, or they'll need far more incentive to create. They'll start projects without finishing, resulting in half-baked Web pages and would-be news sites that ultimately are nothing more than one-off snapshots in time. Like the many cardboard folders I've created and then shoved in my desk or into storage boxes. At some point, they lose their value, and we end up with a bunch of useless Web pages or dead blogs just taking up space and clogging up searches. But, hey, each is an individual user's media portal, and users can do -- or fail utterly to do -- whatever they want. Now, I tested out Zimbio. I added my blog as a resource in its "Tour de France" page. It was pretty simple to add. In fact, the site works pretty smoothly. But many sites do. As I've written in the past regarding news sites that require audience participation, it's not the features of the site but the people in the joint that matter. Interestingly enough, when I signed up to Zimbio, I received my personal dashboard page where I can organize my collections. I'm seeing a lot of these personal dashboards these days. What that says to me is that there will be a lot of personal dashboards sprinkled across the Web with very little activity on them. In like vein, there will be a lot of half-baked topical pages created by many people across a number of services that want to wiki-rize (made-up word) the Web.

Plusmo

This is a mobile service that pushes online content to your mobile phones. It’s another service trying to capitalize on the pervasiveness of mobile phones. More than 72% of U.S. homes have mobile phones. That’s higher than the 70% of homes that have Internet access from computers. There are about 219.4 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., according to CTIA. And, wireless phones now make up 33% of home-phone minutes, vs. 25% in 2004, according to The Kelsey Group.) Additionally, 15% of U.S. wireless users accessed the Web in 2005 vs. 6% in 2004. And, some 30% of wireless subscribers have data services. Clearly, the mobile phone is expanding its usefulness. Great big market! But it’s still a great big problem to get any service. That’s because the problem with many mobile services is that they’re not compatible with all phones, or they’re not so easy to download. For instance, I tried to download Plusmo onto my Palm Treo 650. I couldn’t download it onto my Palm Treo 650 because the Plusmo file wasn’t compatible and I needed an expansion card (SD or MMC), which I didn’t have. That said, downloading onto my Blackberry Pearl was easy enough. It took about 10 minutes to download. As for the Plusmo service, it wasn’t bad. I like the fact that I could find cheap gas prices, based on the zip code I typed in. I liked the Starbucks locator too. Too bad Plusmo doesn’t have an In-N-Out Burger locator. That’s always handy on that long ride to Tahoe and back. It seems the channels that are available, such as Google News, TechCrunch, GigaOm, ValleyWag, to name a few (goes to show you who Plusmo execs are talking to) also have limited content. I added the Google News channel and I only received three news stories. All this said, I think the idea is a neat one. I like visuals as the gateway to news or a movie. It's one reason I have the Slide (photo-sharing site) version of Google.

Flixster - MySpace for movies

This is yet another social network, but the difference is that the content or focus is around movies. Flixster is building upon the popular features that have helped Netflix rent more movies. Those features include the ability to see or make recommendations and see which movies are the most popular among friends or in the Netflix community. Netflix said that some 60% of the movies rented come from recommendations. Clearly, recommendations help people discover new movies to rent. Unlike Netflix, however, on Flixster, you don’t get the great service of receiving movies in the mail. Of course, you don’t have to pay $10 a month either. To that end, Flixster can be a nice complement to the many movie-download services emerging, such as Amazon’s unBox. So, let me share my experience on Flixster. First off, I have to say that this service (more than others) is set up in such a way that it’s easy to invite friends – a form of grass-roots marketing that can have exponential affects on growth. It’s no wonder that in 10 months, Flixster has signed up 5 million registered users who collectively have posted 190 million movie recommendations written. That’s pretty fast. But a lot of that has to do with the way Flixster is set up. One of the smart ways Flixster is making the grass-roots marketing far easier for us is by integrating our address books immediately upon signing up. After I signed up with my gmail account, Flixster displayed my gmail email list and an automated email invite that, with one click, could go to all of my friends (and other random emails) in my email list. Smart move. With one click, I could have invited the 135 emails recorded in my gmail account. The only problem is that the automated invite said: “Hi, I just took a movie quiz at Flixster.com.  If you come take it too we can see if we like the same movies.” Since I didn’t just take a movie quiz, I didn’t think it was honest of me to send this email. Besides, it did feel a bit like I was spamming. The one thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t easily choose which email accounts I wanted to send an email to. Rather, I had to check off each box (next to an email account) that I didn’t want to send an email to. This was rather annoying, and ultimately a turn-off. Another way Flixster is making the invite process easier is by integrating with News Corp’s MySpace. With 115 million members worldwide, it’s a smart integration. At one point in the sign-up process, Flixster asked if I wanted to send a bulletin on my MySpace account inviting my MySpace friends.

The social network features are great. There’s even a feature that lets you upload videos and images related to a particular movie. There is also, of course, the requisite “profile” page. (I think I must have two dozen profile pages by now.)  The site also seems to have some pretty useful reviews and recommendations. But I’m not sure I’d create a social network just around movies. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of movies – having seen three in the movie theaters just in the last week -- but I wouldn’t build a social life around my movie preferences. That said, I did click onto the tab that said “Meet people like me.” The No. 1 person that showed up was a 13-year-old girl.

Niche site for fathers

The Web is going to vertical niche sites! To that end, this is a great idea! If DadLabs can deliver authentic, original, and substantive conent about fatherhood, then it can rise above the clutter of male-focused sites generating content seemingly for brainless fratboys. If DadLabs can create compelling content, it'll get its share of the elusive, but highly attractive 25-45 male demographic. For a brief time, I co-hosted segments for Spike TV, the Viacom-owned cable channel targeting males 18 to 34 years old. There were many experiments in content, but ultimately the executive producer was let go. It wasn't because Spike failed in attracting an audience, but rather because Spike attracted a female audience. Who would have thought? Spike also launched a series on dads. It's unclear how much viewership the show ultimately attracted. Men, we know, like financial news - that's the demographic I attract on MarketWatch -- and they like sports, and women. That said, a niche channel on fatherhood is probably the type of on-demand content that works well for the Web. And, if DadLabs.com can create a nice little community around parenting for dads, I'm sure the marketers will come.

Mobile social networks

If you want to see where your kids will be spending their time in the future, take a look at Gemini Mobile’s platform that lets carriers offer their subscribers a social networking community on their phones. Essentially, the service is a mobile community – a MySpace on the go, but for more virtual reality. The platform is called eXplo, and it powers SoftBank Mobile’s S! Town. S! Town is pretty neat. A subscriber can have an avatar that walks around this virtual world. In the demo I was given, Michael Tao, Gemini Mobile’s CTO, had a black anime as his avatar. His avatar strolled through S!Town’s virtual town center, which was quite deserted, given that it was 4 am in the morning in Japan, where this service is available. At first, it seemed pretty silly and useless to be walking around this deserted town. But then Michael bumped into several females (or at least one might think they were female because their avatars were female). Michael tried to befriend them, while at the same time clicking onto a user profile to find out more about this person. All members have profiles that can be made public to the community. All community members can roam around this virtual town and meet other members. Watching this interaction was a bit frightening, especially when Michael could – with just a click of a button -- find out more about the person whom he was interacting with. When I was a little girl, I played tea with some dolls around a mini table. My future little girl will likely be playing tea on her mobile phone with (hopefully) other little girls. So, what's the business model? Consumers don't pay for the service. Rather they can buy content in the town. There are also advertisements on billboards in the virtual town. In 2007, the service is expected to be deployed with U.S. and European carriers.

Tumri's network merchandising

Tumri wants to help retailers spread their products across a number of Web sites. Essentially, it's a bit like Google's Adsense, whereby any publisher can be the distributor of Google's ads. It's like Edgeio's model of letting publishers be distributors of Edgeio's classified lists. Tumri is a smart idea if it can help retailers find their target market for a specific ad across the fragmented Web. Getting a specific product, say carbon fiber bicycles, distributed across the right sites with the target audience is a tall order. Additionally, Google's advertising Adword clients can create ads for specific products as well and be distributed across Google's Adsense network. After all, merchants are advertisers. Going after the merchant market is essentially the same as going for the advertising market. Look what happened to eBay's merchants. They too are Google advertisers. That said, I like the idea. Additinoally, the cost for merchant is based on performance. To that end, they'll only pay per click. Tumri will probably have to deal with clcik-fraud issues, but for starters, it's a fair way to go for merchants., unless they push for a click-per-action or click-per-purchase model. The trick for Tumri (and Edgeio) is to increase the relevance on the ads for each site. I plan on becoming a Tumri distributor. I'll let you know what I think of the experience over time.