Archive for the 'Rising Stars' Category

We all know the Internet is creating many new, global business opportunities.  However, much of the press (and even my own articles) in North America are still focusing on American entrepreneurs and their technology ventures.  Sure, one could argue that these companies are global in nature.  But the rest of the world is not receiving their fair share of attention.

In lieu of this, I thought the Business 2.0 gallery of best non-US sites to watch is appropriate to share with this community.   Some interesting names pop up such as Stardoll, Vivapets, and Babytree.  I wouldn’t laugh too hard; some top tier venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital are backing some of these ventures.  If you haven’t heard of some of them yet, you can bet you will be soon.
Be sure to check out the maps too!

By all accounts, Max Levchin has achieved a level of success that most of us dream about. As a 23 year old entrepreneur, his company, PayPal.com, was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Now, Jessi Hempel of “Fortune” reports that Levchin is “Cashing in on Blog Bling”.

In the article, Levchin, now 32 years-old, has a new startup venture called Slide.com. The website allows users to post pictures in a slideshow format. Levchin’s plan is to embed advertising into this widget to transform the company into a profitable business.

Cashing in on the online advertising business isn’t new. However, Levchin’s plan is to allow Slide.com users to “..decorate their slide shows with logos, props, and other branded elements” from advertisers. Sounds interesting. Time will tell if Levchin’s venture turns out to be another hit or just a flash in the pan.

Today’s article introduces One Laptop One Child (OLOC), the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte.  Negroponte is currently on leave from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology.

The goal of OLOC is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.  The origins of OLPC stretch back more than four decades to the primordial days of computing, when most machines were still the size of small dinosaurs and next to no one imagined they had any connection to children. Pioneer thinkers such as Seymour Papert dreamed they would be suitable for children, and time has proved the immense power of the personal computer as a learning tool.

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

If you mention Seth Godin, what comes to mind? How about “Purple Cow”, “Small is the New Big”, or even “The Dip”? Sound familiar? Seth is a bestselling author of these books and others not listed. He was the founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. As if that weren’t enough, Godin is a reknowned speaker and founder of Squidoo.

What is Squidoo?

The following is posted on the Squidoo website:

Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.

Squidoo is quickly gaining popularity through the relative ease of creating a lens and, more importantly, because a well optimized Squidoo page is ranked higher on Google than any other articles on any other websites.

Squidoo has even created an interesting ecosystem for enterprising Internet entrepreneurs. For instance, individuals are monetizing their articles on Squidoo through participation in affiliate and ad revenue sharing programs. In addition, others have written an eBook about how to monetize your Squidoo (”Squidoo Secrets”).

If you haven’t visited Seth Godin’s latest venture, stop on by and see what the buzz is about. You may even want to build your own page on Squidoo. Also, be sure to check out Andrew Johnson’s interview with Seth Godin on Andrew’s Web Publishing Blog.

A few days ago I wrote about Agloco whose tagline is “Own the Internet”.  It is playing off the concept that no one really owns the Internet and that everyone should be able to participate in the online wealth.  This is a nice, democratic, utopian notion but sadly one that’s far from the truth.  In fact, some are creating incredible wealth for themselves much like the California Gold Rush in 1848.  Ken Ham is one such Internet mogul and tycoon; he’s also someone most of us have never heard of until now.

In May 2007, Paul Sloan of “Business 2.0″ profiled Ham in the cover story for the publication.  Sloan’s article was titled, “The Man Who Owns the Internet”.   Ham is an unassuming man who has quietly been building his Internet empire through acquisition of domain names (also known as a “domainer”) since 2000. Originally trained as a family doctor,  Ham now has a portfolio of 300,000 domain names that, combined with some other ventures, generate $70 million annually.

Check out Sloan’s article to learn more about his rise to fame and Internet riches.

I was at a networking event catching up with old friends and making new ones.  You never know who you’re going to meet or what kind of interesting things you’ll find out.  Instead of keeping you in suspense, I’ll just say I caught up with my new friend, Joanne (Joey) Wan.

I met Joey last fall at an event she organized.  At the time, I already knew she was an amazing networker and events organizer.  However, little did I know she held the dubious title of Ms. Web 2.0 as nominated by Valleywag.com.  How did I find out?

When I ran into her this afternoon, we caught up and discussed her new role at GigaOm.  What was an innocent question became a funny story.  “So, how do you know Om Malik?”  It turns out the King and Queen of Web 2.0 tied the proverbial knot in business thanks to Valleywag’s “prestigious” award.

So, rather than let this story fade off into the sunset, I told Joey that I plan to revive her title and award until another can come along and “dethrone” her.  Congratulations Joey!  Read the full article here.

I recently read an article on Business 2.0 by Michael V. Copeland, “What’s next for the Internet”.  The article profiles Nova Spivack who is heading a stealth venture called Radar Networks.  Spivack’s company is planning to bring order to the World Wide Web (also known as semantic Web) and take our Internet experience to the next level (Web 3.0).

Spivack’s company isn’t the only one to tackle this problem.  Many start ups such as Metaweb Technologies and Powerset are aggressively pursuing this opportunity.  In fact, this disruptive technology has the potential to displace existing Internet titans such as Google and Yahoo.

Note: Spivack also happens to be the grandson of legendary management guru, Peter Drucker.

To read the full article, click here.

On July 15, 2007, Virtual Worlds Direct, a UK-based company, is about to launch a revolutionary product, Codenamed Project E-Play, in the multi-billion dollar online gaming and entertainment segment–one of the largest and fastest growing markets on the Internet.The buzz is already building simply by word-of-mouth / viral marketing. Remember the early days of free email from Hotmail.com? Well, that company experienced explosive growth and was eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Project E-Play is a combination of online skills-based games, social networking using Web 2.0, and referral / affiliate marketing dubbed “Social Marketing 2.0″.

Let’s break this down and look at each component. We’ll first start with the online gaming and entertainment industry. Even though this market is large and growing, timing could not be better. More and more people are spending their leisure time in “cyberspace”. In addition, broadband is reaching more and more homes.

Even in less developed countries where the PC is a luxury, Internet cafes are commonplace and visited often as a place of social gathering. In fact, these Internet cafes derive an estimated 30-40% of their revenue from people playing games online.

Next, let’s take a look at social networking and Web 2.0. Just a few years ago, most people had not heard of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg and other emerging Web 2.0 services. Now, these services are so common that even Fortune 500 companies are taking an interest. Google acquired YouTube and News Corp acquired MySpace, making the founders of both extremely rich!

Finally, Social Marketing 2.0 is about having fun playing games, meeting new friends, and receiving compensation without having to sell. This new model will enable anyone to create an income stream purely by challenging friends and contacts to games.

You can register as an affiliate now. You will receive a FREE website and receive the latest information once you successfully register as an affiliate member.

by Mike Fennelly

From Valleywag.com :

Ms. Dewey is a new, humanized search engine from Microsoft. An animated figure, played by actress Janina Gavankar, knocks the screen to remind the user to type a search query. “Hello-oooh, type something here,” she says, impatiently. The only problem with human search engines: they’re human, and they did anything to get ahead, when young. On Ms. Dewey’s search engine, Janina Gavankar shows some geekbait cleavage. In b-flick Cup of My Blood, the actress showed off rather more. Photos after the jump, not safe for work.

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