I am very interested in Ether as a therapist, but it seems as if most people would register for “1-900″ numbers, and I don’t want to be associated with that type of pay for phone time services.

Here’s my take…

Sharpcast - I love the free version of this called Foldershare (www.foldershare.com) which Microsoft bought and promotes. But I’m sure these guys have a chance too…

Webaroo - I think IE6.0 does this, no?

PostApp - extra-large yawn for the ‘tools for bloggers’ category

Vpod.tv - Nothing like competing with iTunes and other freeware tools, eh? But I’m sure the $5mill will give them enough in marketing cash to take on Apple…

Ether - shouldn’t be in this list, they actually seem to provide a service, have a business model, and be useful outside of the Web 2.0 world (maybe I’ll even create an Ether number to use for advising people on Web 2.0 silliness)

Lifeio - Can’t wait for my.yahoo.com to launch

GearON - So it’s CitySearch + Friendster, except on my cell phone… could actually be interesting

Soonr - nothing like cell phones being used to make phone calls over your data connection - because Skype quality is only much much worse than my cell phone…

Zixxo - I think I get free coupons with the newspaper every sunday…

Attensa - already covered: http://www.dead20.com/2006/06/.....-rss-tool/

Netvibes - see Lifeio above

StumbleUpon - malware 2.0

Regarding the comment “I think I get free coupons with the newspaper every Sunday”. Yes and the newspaper also has news, so I guess news sites on the web are dead on arrival. Oh the newspaper also has classified ads, so online classifieds like Criagslist must be dead on arrival. Last I looked the newspaper also had employment pages, so job websites like Monster must be dead on arrival too. Your “dead 2.0″ indicates that you are solely focused on attacking anything web2.0. But were you to actually visit ZiXXo, you would see that the functionality and user experience with coupons online is far richer than the flat national coupons you get in the Sunday newspaper.

Unfortunately, ZiXXo’s website is down at the moment, my apologies for extremely bad timing. We’ll have it back up shortly.

Mike,

First off, I am always open to new good ideas - I don’t attack “anything” Web 2.0. Online news does quite well, and now, about 10 years since it got started, it’s really proven itself.

Craigslist is very successful in very limited regions, specifically those with a high leaning toward Internet activity. You must be based in one of these cities. Also, Craig Newmark has a really good attitude about what his business does. You should take caution here, since the revenue for newspaper ads has plummeted, it has NOT yet been made up online in the same way at all.

Most importantly - who is your target market? As far as I know, the coupon-clipping world isn’t really who I picture going to your Web site, finding a deal (despite how good the experience is), printing it out, then saving a dime on prune juice at safeway’s.

But I am always open to be proved wrong! You can email me (skeptic _at dead2o dot_com) any time when your site is open. At the end of the day, my goal is not to attack, but to add a ‘reality check’ which I feel is sorely lacking from most Web 2.0 publicity these days. Tell you what, once you are up and running, if you contact me I’ll be happy to do a ‘review’ of the service and give you full opportunity to post a counterpoint (if you don’t like what I say) on dead2o.com, with full accreditation. Fair?

Congratulations on getting new Advertisers..It reflects good quality of content you are providing through your website.
Also best thing about your advertisers is that they are following Web2.0 Standard.
Keep up the Good Work

Hi Mike (comment#1) -
We built Ether for professionals like you and to address your concern, Ether does *not* allow adult content. All the best.

Well, it looks like Vpod is powered by the open source software ffmpeg when it comes to transcoding :
http://www.loiclemeur.com/fran.....t-12704727.
They still have innovation with monetization, like, eh… ads ???

A company in 1998 had exactly the same model as Zixxo. It was called SaveSmart and featured local coupons which could be retrieved online at local stores, and offered search and display algorithms to deal with the problem of coupon order rotation and proper search critera so one vendor wasn’t favored over another. But 1998 was a couple years too early to deliver this as a product.

I wonder how many more recycled business models we’ll see now that almost everyone has onlne access?

College students; http://mynoteit.com

I love StumbleUpon.

Mike:

ZiXXo has nothing new in the coupon space. It’s actually amusing that a company like this would be selected to present at a conference like Supernova. Getting any critical mass of content and participants will be a daunting task that these guys will not solve.

Next?

imo, http://www.dead20.com/ is probably a more realistic source of 2.0 site reviews…

I would love to know of the other 88 that did not make it.
Also, surprised that none of the 12 selected is in SE related.

…sorry for the repost—but if you were around during the first dot-bomb era, a lot of these sites are re-hashes of previous dot bombs.

It’s almost like the investors forgot how quickly some of these sites/ideas went down in flames. Such as the ZiXXo, Webaroo, PostApp, Lifeio…etc…

This is web 2.0? Mildly intertesing but now inspiring. What about embedding turnkey right-clearance mechanisms inside creative content? What about embedding geographical location inside video clips, and making it searchable so citizens posting clips can get together with near-neighbours to make longer better videos, buy and share equipment? What about location-aware devices and all the spin-off possibilities for mapping and linking local people? What about IPTV “citizen editor” recommendation services? What about richly emotionally engaging interactive multimedia _storytelling_, rather than couch-potato video pap?

Ugh, my typing - “intertesing but now inspiring” should read “interesting but _not_ inspiring”.

Thanks for the awareness. I’m really impressed with netvibes!

Why are people so interested in Web 2.0? There isn’t much support for it, furthermore, the functionality are too encourgaing as well.

Encoding to FLV isn’t that hard (a la YouTube, Vpod). I just got that working this morning.

If you’re using Fedora Core 4, you just have to make sure you have your YUM repositories set up correctly, then do a :

yum update
yum install ffmpeg

Next use these instructions to convert your video to FLV.

Apparently the quality isn’t as good as the On2 encoder. Anyone know what YouTube uses? (not that theirs is off the charts either)

Great roundup though, Michael!

Oh and Keith - I think you’re reading the wrong blog =)

My rant on Zixxo:

I like Zixxo’s model.

Zixxo’s advantages in my opinion:
1. Coupons are converging from paper to electronic.
2. Internet economy of scales offers major cost savings.
3. Environmentally friendly, compared to paper coupons.
4. The amount of internet users are growing daily.
5. They offer a reasonable affiliate program, however, I think they can do more in my opinion by offering some sort of content management system directly dealing with companys like Valpak, HotCoupons, or other local coupon websites and feeding that into Zixxo.
6. Their only real competitor is myclipper.com.
7. Tons of ways for organic growth (i.e. teaming of up with yellow pages or local websites like citysearch.com).

Zixxo’s disadvanteges in my opinion:
1. Security of coupons, potential fraud for people to create fake coupons.
2. CoolSavings patent, hopefully they have made arrangement to access it.
3. I am skeptical of a few other things.

-My two pennies (2 copper pennies X current copper value = 6 to 8 cents, now that is good abritage business model, illegal?, maybe…

arbitrage*

Ever seen a real-world Media Asset Management solution?
http://celumimagine.com is the way to go, we’ve just launched it company wide for 800 users.

I am not too sure of Webaroo - since onfolio seems to be a lot better option. Webaroo could have been a super hit if this was 1990. But not now.

Here is my wish list for webaroo

Ashish Sinha

Hmmm. I don’t recall seeing mom-and-pop coupons in the local Sunday paper lately. I don’t believe mom-and-pops can compete dollar-for-dollar in the local Sunday paper coupon space against the likes of Dell, Best Buy, Sears, Ford, GM, Macy’s, etc. I’m willing to give Skeptic one beer for every mom-and-pop coupon that appears in a local Sunday paper, e.g. the San Francisoc Chronicle, in exchange for one beer from Skeptic for every national coupon that appears in the same paper. Are you game?

As a landlord, I’m no longer handcuffed to the local papers for advertising my rentals since I’ve been liberated by Craigslist. I’ve posted ads for my rentals at 10pm and have received calls within 15 minutes. I see the same type of empowerment being given to the mom-and-pops. The convenience factor isn’t so much for the end user as it is for the mom-and-pops posting their coupons via ZiXXo’s interface. Hat’s off to Mike and the ZiXXo team!!!

ç.lsfjka

Must be my imagination but I thought Stumble Upon could read my mind the first couple of times I tried it, then it started to surprise me with stuff I’ve seen before but lost track of or forgot about. Thanks for the links.

StumbleUpon..?? I can get high visitor using this service!!