TECHNOSIGHT — Sep 21 — Mike Arrington – the founder of the popular blog TechCrunch stated, "the best entrepreneurs never listen to anybody."
What's Different from Web 1.0
– Slow Apps vs. _Javascript/AJAX/Flash Apps
– One-way vs. Two way
– IPO for Billions vs. Sell for Millions
– Beg for PR vs. News Spread Virally
– Recycling 1999 Ideas Isn't Stupid
Some of the Winners – Mike defines a winner as a company who sold their business: Writely, Newroo, Delicious, Weblogs, MySpace, and Skype…
Future winners include: Digg, Facebook, Youtube, Netvibes, Zoho Projects, Photobucket, PlentyofFish, Netvibes, and StumbleUpon. Facebook is probably worth $2B. PlentyofFish is Match.com but free and its a one man show. The guy running it is making $300k/month. FULL ARTICLE @ TECHNOSIGHT
Great Stuff! But what about all the t-shirts sites? These sites have been built around a mix of “unique product” and “community” (very 2.0). This business is exploding on the internet and hardly anyone is talking about it (except for Mr. Pui-wing Tam from WSJ.com). Spreadshirt.com just received several million in VC funding from Accel (they also went from online to off-line by actually opening their first retail store: http://www.derby.spreadshirt.net), and LaFraise.com just sold for about $3 million (the company was ran by 3 people and was only 2-years old). In the US, there are projects like Threadless.com, TshirtHell.com, Bustedtees.com and Defunker.com making millions. Many of these sites have their own community. CollegeHumor.com (a leading college community site) is responsible for Bustedtees and Defunker. I heard (rumor) that the successful Spanish project, http://www.SetaLoca.com is looking to hit the US market next year. There’s a HUGE Hispanic market just waiting to be tapped and I’m sure it will be a hit with non-Spanish speakers, as well. Anyway, it would be interesting to see someone follow this “online t-shirt” industry! Cheers and I look forward to reading more from Michael.
This is proof that there is still a market in online dating, though many have said it’s a doomed industry. Yes I think it is doomed, at least when your talking about the bloated subscription based sites. The next service that will capitalize in this market will be innovate, and totally take everyone by surprise. They will do it by taking some chances, and also staying small. Small truly is the new big…
Why there is still a huge oppertunity in online dating
Plenty of fish has made Mike Arrington\’s list of what\’s hot (as I broke when I was at Carson\’s workshop in San Francisco). I am happy to see that a free online dating site has broken into the \”mainstream\”.
Plentyoffish has been quite an enigma…
>>bloated subscription based sites. The next service that will capitalize in this market will be innovate, and totally take everyone by surprise. They will do it by taking some chances, and also staying small. Small truly is the new big…
Well, if that’s true, then we are the new big! LOL
For years we have found it more important to offer quality conservative Christians than a bunch of quantity. We don’t allow and we do remove duplicate accounts, we remove inactive accounts, we allow members to search within so many days active as well as so many days new. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. Who wants to muddle through thousands of bogus profiles, inactive profiles, and duplicate profiles.
We did receive a lot of flack for deleting inactive profiles too soon (even though we do send out a warning email seven days prior), from members who only check in once in a while, or receive the introductions via email and return only when someone shows up that really stands out, so we extended our inactive period and allow members to actually return results only from recently active members to help compensate.
But yes, we have heard complaints from members who were on the large sites and felt they had to muddle through page after page of profiles that were simply bogus.
God bless,
Nannette Thacker
http://www.ChristianSinglesDating.com