Tomorrow, there will be an event organized by Monte Jade that features a panel discussing the transition from an employee to a founder. This is especially relevant in the current fertile climate of Web 2.0 companies. Many times, the founders of these companies have made the jump, or are thinking about making the jump, from their day job to a potentially risky job as CEO.

The panelists include some founders who have successfully made this transition:

• Tom Cole - Partner at Trinity Ventures
• Dave Lu - Founder of FanPop
• Charles Ying - Founder of Mobile80

This event should be especially interesting to people who are curious to see the trials, tribulations, and delight in heading off on your own as a business trailblazer.

When
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Where
Orrick
1000 Marsh Road
Menlo Park, California 94025

For more details and registration, refer to the Upcoming.org page.

Michael Masnick, the President and CEO of Techdirt, was gracious enough to do an interview with us at the Office 2.0 Conference. Techdirt, which has been around since 1997, has a simple mission: getting the right information to the right people at the right time. They do this by employing a balance between human expertise and technology.

In the interview, Michael talks about what Techdirt does, including some of their new initiatives, such as the Techdirt Insight Community, which allows companies to harness the knowledge and expertise of bloggers. Find out if you can be part of the Techdirt Insight Community, and get paid to blog. Speaking of blogs, Techdirt is a great one, but what other blogs does Michael like? Find out now…

     

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About a month ago, Cisco updated to the new logo shown to the left. Recently, they’ve added some new user-centric Web 2.0 features to the Cisco.com website. Some of the new additions include consumer forums to review Cisco products, a landing page for users to download podcasts focused on sharing ways to use different internet technologies, RSS feeds for new product announcements, and even a mobile friendly version of the site. A live video chat on October 26th will allow Cisco’s consumers to talk about the sites changes and get their input. 

These site changes coincide with last weeks introduction of the Cisco Digital Media System which helps business customers connect with their customers, partners, or employees through rich digital media. One of the most recent case studies to implement Cisco’s Digital Media System technology is Brunel University in the UK. According to Cisco’s press release, “professors and university staff will be able to capture, store, record, and deliver digital media content, which will extend the resources of the university…Brunel will introduce video conferencing into the lecture halls as well as enhance further collaboration with other institutions, developing more e-learning and interactive projects along the way.”

For a company that started out solely manufacturing enterprise routing equipment, this is a huge step to connect more with the end user instead of their customer’s purchasers. Sun Microsystems has taken a similar step with the introduction of their Sun employee blog network, including one belonging to CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

While Web 2.0 is based on more interactivity and user involvement, it seems to have also caused a shift in the way corporations are thinking about how they are perceived within the community. This might not be that big of a deal for Cisco and Sun, both in the high-tech industry, but it will be great if we see the trend transcend to drug manufacturers, tobacco companies, oil conglomerates, and other old-school, tight-collared corporate entities. Let’s hope that Web 2.0 leads to a corporation 2.0, where end-users opinions really do matter, and the bottom line is connected to how well the company is perceived within the community.  

One of my favorite places to find addicting games is at digggames, which aggregates flash games that have made it to the front page of Digg. With Digg’s current interface, it can be difficult to distill these kinds of genres from previous posts. Thus, digggames was really doing a service by filtering out Digg’s content for a niche market. Recently, they were served a cease a desist letter (page 1 and 2) from Digg claiming that they were infringing on Digg’s trademarks.

But, why not stop there? If Digg is going to go after digggames, why don’t they also go after 80% of the sites on the digg tools list? Sites like Diggdot.us, DiggLicious, and Digg vs Dot would also be ripe for a takedown. At the extreme end, mashups would all be considered illegal, squashing all the creative juices that have made web 2.0 innovative and liberating.

Certainly, Digg has the right to enforce its trademarks. But, taking down digggames, a small homebrewed site that isn’t meant to compete with Digg, takes points off of my book for Digg.

TheNewPR Wiki has a great set of elements that every company should be monitoring. For web 2.0 companies, many of these are obvious, like tracking your company URL, tags, digg, and other social news sites. But, for many companies not typically in the tech loop, searching for their name on Flickr is about as alien as asking the cows what they think of their product.

As social sites gain popularity, companies can and should start tracking everything from YouTube to MySpace. The number of things to track in the list currently stands at 29, and could probably grow to at least twice that with a little more thought.

But, what if you’re only one person with very limited time starting a new site? Here is a list of sites I typically use to track my buzz on a daily basis. This is by no means a complete list, but, combined, they can be used as a quick barometer on how well your marketing is doing. Perusing these sites is typically how I start my day (or night).

• Technorati: Still the most comprehensive blog aggregator and search engine. Use it to see who’s talking about you.
• Google Search: Should be a no brainer. Use it to see what sites have used your brand’s name.
• Google Link Search: Search Google with the query “link:your site’s url“. You’ll see all the sites that are linking to yours.
• Google Groups Search: Newgroups are still one of the most active places on the net. Yet, many people forget they even exist (I sometimes do).
• Alexa and Alexaholic: Great for comparing how your site’s traffic is doing with respect to competitors. However, take this with a grain of salt, since Alexa only monitors a small sample of web surfers (those that have the Alexa toolbar).
• del.icio.us and digg: Both of these have a lot of activity, especially among the avante guarde techies.
• stumbleupon URL page: Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/your site’s url/ to see reviews that stumbleuponers leave. They are a really active and passionate community, and leave good comments about your site (if it’s already been stumbled upon).
• socialmeter: A relatively new aggregate search site that quickly tallies the number of times your url appears in many popular social bookmarking and search sites. It also links to the relevant search pages for each of the bookmarking sites.
• TagFetch: Another tag search engine which is more visual than socialmeter, and has a richer feature set.

If you know of any more valuable search sites that have helped you track your brand, leave a comment about it below.

I was recently looking for a room somewhere in the city on Craigslist, and realized that, even though Craigslist has the largest user base, it doesn’t do a good job of organizing rommmate matching data. There’s no set format for gender, sleeping, and other lifestyle preferences. So, I was curious to see if there were any companies out there whose goal is to match roommates.

This was when I stumbled upon Roomster, which has a decent amount of lifestyle data that you can enter. You can also browse people with similar interests who are either looking for a roommate, or offering a room. There’s also a way to let Roomster automatically suggest matches, but, the ones given to me seemed quite arbitrary, either due to the limited user base or the actual matching algorithms.

This is all well and good–I didn’t have any hopes that Roomster would be the holy grail of roommate matching. That’s when I got an email from Roomster notifying me that a potential roommate had sent me a message. I quickly logged in, only to find this upgrade screen:

I couldn’t believe it: I had to upgrade to a premium account in order to view my messages! A core functionality such as messaging should never be a premium service on a roommate matching site. Any restrictions based on premiums should be reserved for power user types of functions. Flickr offers all of their services for free, but with a bandwidth limit. If I want to upload a few photos, message people, and make a few albums, I could use their service for free. The equivalent of restricting my messaging capability on Roomster would be restricting my commenting ability in Flickr, which would be utterly ridiculous.

The bottom line is that all I want to do is to read and write a few messages. I’m just a casual Roomster user who is turned off by the fee to read my messages. What Roomster could do is to limit the number of messages per day or week, based on the free account. Another option would be to charge the people who are renting their rooms, rather than the people hunting for rooms. The new pricing model in Web 2.0 is to charge the few, and give away the technology to the rest. Roomster is charging everyone a flat fee to get the basics of their service, which is not a good move.

Is the next emerging trend in web services going to be of the micropayment kind? If anything, Amazon’s Alexa Site Thumbnail service points to the idea of offering small value products at a very small cost.

For just $0.0002 per thumbnail, you can display website thumbnails on your site from Alexa’s database using SOAP or REST. If the site isn’t yet indexed, they’ll index it within 24 hours. This is mostly intended for sites that would benefit from having screenshots of other sites, like BuzzShout, for instance. This is unlike Browsershots, which is aimed at developers.

So, is 20 cents for 1000 thumbnails worth it? Perhaps, if you’re a large site that requires continuously updating thumbnails. But for most of us, it wouldn’t be too hard to cobble up a script to take automatic screenshots similar to what Browsershots is doing.

I say that Amazon should provide the screenshots free, just like with their Alexa graphs. I doubt that monetizing thumbnails will really be worth it for them, and, in the end, providing a service like this for free would gain the favor of web developers everywhere.

On another note, I’m sure Google has a vast thumbnail database that magnitudes bigger than Amazon’s. They just need to release the API.

After running BuzzShout for about 5 months, I’ve come to realize the importance of being able to sum up your company’s goal in a concise and easy to understand pitch. Everyday, I get company submissions with descriptions that could fill a book. That’s when I visit the site in question, and try to wittle down their essay into a few short sentences. Unfortunately, many times I can’t even begin to do any wittling, since the company themselves have lost sight of what their mission is! Aaron Post has had similar experiences, and started Your Elevator Pitch, which is a resource for businesses needing to hone their pitches.

The inspiration for their site is best summed up on their own pitch page, which gives an anecdote about a company that spent an hour presenting what they do. When asked what their elevator pitch was, they froze. This is reason why at networking events like Stirr, company pitches are limited to one minute. Getting to the pith of your company’s existence is the most effective way to communicate to potential customers.

Your Elevator Pitch lets companies submit their pitches for visitors to rate and comment on. It’s a great resource for any startup needing to tighten their verbage. They currently have about 85 submitted pitches, with a lot of ranking going on. You don’t need to login to rank, so it’s easy for people to jump in and put in their two cents.

In addition to pitch ranking, they have lists of various resources for making good pitches. Next time you submit something to BuzzShout, give Your Elevator Pitch a try to hone your companies description. I’m more apt to check out a site if the description is clear and exciting.

Check out this post written in the Dead 2.0 blog. While BuzzShout helps the consumer cut through the hype to find the best websites and applications for you, the Dead 2.0 post aims to help new “Web 2.0″ companies avoid believing their own hype. Some of their best advice:

• Don’t count on your social networking feature to carry the weight of your entire business.
• Find friends who don’t drink the cool-aid and get some genuine feedback. (Then you and your friends login to BuzzShout and share your feedback with all of us).
• Don’t affiliate yourself with Web 2.0 because the term will eventually die a horrific death 2.0. (Did you ever listen to Vanilla Ice or Milli Vanilli? Of course you didn’t…)

I hope whoever is behind Dead 2.0 is also using BuzzShout to help all of us cut through the hype. As we all know, the worst thing about all the emerging websites is finding the ones that are really the most useful/interesting/relevant/etc.

There was a controversial thread over at Techcrunch about Flickr not opening up their API to Zooomr. Two sides promptly formed behind each company in the comments (with some pretty harsh words being said about Zooomr). The Zooomr proponents said that Flickr shouldn’t be afraid of opening up to their competitor, and that keeping their system closed harkens back to the days of Web 1.0. In the end, Butterfield of Flickr cleared it up by saying that they will indeed be opening up to competitors, as long as they reciprocate the gesture by opening their own API. This was supposedly a change of heart.

We have to remember that Flickr is a company, not some free wheeling do-gooder that will cater to anyone’s request. It should come as no suprise that Flickr woudl take some time out to carefully consider opening their API directly to their competitor. In the end, I believe that Flickr has made the right decision, which could potentially allow Zooomr users to transfer all their Flickr photos to their Zooomr account. There’s no reason for Flickr to tether their user’s content. But for people to say that this decision should be a knee-jerk reaction is quite ridiculous.