FlipTrack launched a product with a unique approach to online slide show creation tonight and I think it could catch on fairly well. It’s a desktop application that combines an interface that looks like Garage Band or Audacity with song lyrics and an…

Youtube is by far the leader in videos. You can’t argue that. But…. What about the people that don’t use video cameras and just take still photos. This is a MUCH bigger market. These days everyone has a pocket sized camera with them just about everywhere they go. Go to a party and look around the room. 90% of the people have cameras. You may only see a few people with actual video cameras. I’m a BIG Believer in this market and I think it gives people like me (who just take pictures) a very cool and fun way to put my pictures to music and really create an experience around the pictures.

I LOVE IT!

I also agree that having a link on a VC’s blog is a key to success and that FilmLoop is the market leader because of the traffic Guy’s blog drives to them. In fact, I encourage all entrepreneurs to demand that their investment term sheet include a provision that if the VC has a blog, he add a link to your website on it. This can be a tough sell, but if you read my upcoming book you can charm them into giving you this concession.

Hmm, lovely pictures of family and friends, then finished off with an ad for McDonalds.

(1) They let creators post HTML Code to their sites and play it within their sites.
(I created my first FilmLoop a year ago http://www.goncharova.com/stihi/Omoeymame.html,
and at that time they already had this helpful feature).
This feature is something, I am sure others will catch up with soon.

(2) It is (co?) funded by Guy Kawasaki, charismatic leader. Charisma is half of success in today’s web. Also, Guy’s popular blog certainly helps as a marketing channel.

In my opinion, the Slide funding may be one of the best examples of a bubble and represents everything that’s wrong with venture capital. $20 million for a slideshow/widget company? That in itself is ridiculous. What’s more disappointing is that a renowned VC like Vinod Khosla actually participated in this. It appears first and foremost from the quotes in their press release and on other blogs that the VCs are putting money in because the company was started by Max Levchin. We all know that Max is a smart guy and hit a home run with PayPal. VCs invest primarily in people and Max certainly has a proven track record, but at what point do you stop and say “Okay. This person founded one of the most well-known Internet startups, is extremely intelligent and a very capable founder, but the real business opportunity that exists for his startup is currently lacking and this is not a startup that needs $20 million.” It’s true that a great founder can make a success out of a marginal business while a bad founder can make a failure out of a great business, but the problem here is that there is NO clear business, as evidence from this excerpt from VentureBeat:

“The site lets you push slideshows, onto your blog for example, or to share your favorite photos with friends and family. But it also lets you pull them, accepting a slideshow of images fed from your friends or from your favorite Web sites. It is the latter feature, where people might pull slideshows of products from their favorite retailers, for example, where Slide sees a business model. Slide also lets eBay sellers feature their wares in slideshows. It’s unclear whether Slide has made progress in making money.”

If that business model is the best the PayPal co-founder can do after $12 million, I’m not impressed. By the time you’ve already taken that type of money and have traction on the user acquisition front, you should at least have a very clearly formulated business model and some real market validation of revenue potential. The fact that Slide has a “vision that puts the company at the center of the massive user-generated content trend that drives the fastest growing segment of the Web” is absolutely irrelevant if they have no way of making money.

Max is certainly a wealthy man and if he truly believes in the business potential of this venture, maybe he should put up $20 million himself. Instead of doing that, he takes money from VCs and gives Khosla a wondeful compliment by saying that he “grasped” his vision for slides faster than other VCs. Wow. Perhaps this old boys network of VCs and the entrepreneuers they don’t hesitate to fund is the reason that more and more entreprenuers are passing up the VCs and are building startups without their help?

At least in Bubble 1.0 $20 million would have gotten you a piece of a real money-losing *business*. Today it buys you a money-losing widget. A fool and his money are soon parted indeed.

This space is getting crowded.