You should see this post on widget advertising:
http://textrapolate.com/2008/ 06/the-widget-is-dead- sort-of/

Seriously, fire the person or the company who manged their PR, what a dumb mistake!

RockYou took $ from them, because no one else was stupid enough to give a company like RY a $300M valuation, especially since they are <$3M in revs…last time I checked, a P/E of 100 for a company in the useless widget space was a bit overboard.

@Lame – RockYou is working on a fart on your friend widget…should bump the multiple to at least 200

Couldn’t agree more.
Most of the case, it’s always old dog , new tricks.

It’s the idea that kick’s ass

Software is the most hyped industry compared to others. There have been numerous applications developed to be so called Web 2.0 compliant that have been hyped like, that they are the discovery of the century, labeled with terms such as cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, world-beater, and so forth. I’ve yet to see a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, world-beater Web 2.0. Most of the web startups that are frequently covered here at techcrunch are not cutting-edge in any form and also I have a pretty good idea of what the technology behind these web-application that are labeled state-of-the-art, world-beater. Websites is just websites, regardless of what hyping terms that are used to describe them.

I would merely point you toward US spending in Iraq

Sorry, I am not a US citizen to comment on the US foreign policies. I do have an opinion, but this is not a right forum to discuss it.

If I had a dime for every “here comes the bubble”(there was even a video) comment I’d be making more than all current startups put together

FWIW, SmugMug and 37signals claim profits.

If you want to talk about rat holes, I would merely point you toward US spending in Iraq.

HIDE! TAKE COVER!

I am making an educated guess about the Bubble-2 since the tell-tale sign of Bubble-1, is starting to emerg now, ie, multi-million funding of useless internet startups. No one has been to the future to witness that Bubble-2 is coming, but one can only infer information from the past and this is how human reason everyday. It might be wrong inference, but it can’t be impossibly wrong 100%.

By the way Phil, do you know any of the so called Web 2.0 startups making any profits yet? I don’t count a startup that has been acquired, since some are being acquired for their perceived value, rather than a healthy profit & returns. So, if you know any profitable Web-2.xxx startups then I am keen to know about those ones.

It doesn’t matter b/c the only people that will lose is VCs. There aren’t any public markets wrapped up in these investments. Risk is primary to the world of venture capital, they are prepared.

Only way I could get your attention. Your forums section on TechCrunch has been hacked by a user called Al3ade. He is changing peoples posts and has linked to a SPAM site.

If I am an investor in those VCs that dish out millions for unproductive tools like these, I would take my money out now, because the dot.com 2 is not far off. Most of the tools that are covered here at TechCrunch are targeting the advertisement industry but not many are targeting to sell the software (subscription-based perhaps) to the end user.

I attended a lecture by Prof. Michael A. Cusumano from MIT management school recently here in New Zealand about developing software as a product compared to targeting it as a service exactly as those which target the paid online advertisement industry. He had studied software companies in detail over the last decade, and he said that when the going gets tough, the vendor with a software product tend to survive in the long run. The software service based vendors are the ones that get folded very quickly when the climate is not going well.

Beware every one. Dot.com 2 is coming.