Startup Addict Musings

WooMe is a new startup that is the equivelant of speed dating for social networks. A speaker, mic and webcam required you signup and meet 5 people in 5 minutes. You decided who Woo’s you or click the “no thanks” button and they will disappear from your network forever. WooMe startup is a simple concept and executed well for niche speed networking.

A solid team seems to be in place and a fun concept back story from the founder’s sister.

Tags: Startups by Startup Addict

Yesterday Google released a new API for the “social graph”. You can check out our previous discussions on the social graph here. Google’s announcement of the social graph API plays well with the 2008 theme of aggregation and organization of social media for users. The API will allow users to find and track data on their social connections across the Internet.
Tim O’reilly stated the social graph API is a major step in what he is calling “the Internet Operating System.”

Why do we care you ask? As entrepreneurs, we create startups that consist of, social networks, social media, widgets, rss feeds, aggregators, mashups etc…the Social Graph API will reduce the burden on users recreating and entering personal data in a world of hundreds of social networks.

The backend of social networks will have the ability to query data across the web pertaining to yourself and friends and populate the relationship of that data. The user will then be able to tweak the results for accuracy. Thus, enabling the spider and crawlers to do a better job populating your information in the future.

The privacy concerns will continue to be a red flag as the social graph matures, but ultimately will be easier to control in the end. More on this in later posts..

Google is on the forefront along with other big companies and a handful of startups to create a more standardized semantic web. Dataportability will actually become real with friendly API’s that allow users to both push and pull information for various social media sources along with friendly user standards like OpenID. This will allow the DataPortability group to fulfill its’ mission of:

To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

The earlier these standards are adopted the better the chances a startup will have in the social media space.

Tags: Data Portability by Startup Addict

The rumors flying around over this past year may very well come true. Microsoft makes a $44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo. According to NewYorkTimes that represents a 62% premium to the existing stock prices and places a $31.00 valuation on Yahoo. The stock is already up 59% in pre-market trading for today on the news. This comes two days after missed earnings and a 7% layoff of the work force (roughly 1000 people).

The likely-hood of the transaction consummating is extremely high in my opinion for 3 reasons:

1. Microsoft has a boat-load of cash and can entice Yahoo with more cash than stock in the deal.
2. This offers a truly high premium to existing shareholders and business mantra is still to “maximize shareholder wealth”.
3. Micro-hoo will become the premium destination in terms of traffic on the Internet and a powerhouse in search advertising.

This may cost Microsoft in the short-run but will put them in a dominating advertising revenue position on the Internet. Remember Microsoft purchased advertising companies aQuantive for$ 6 Billion and Yahoo purchased RightMedia for $680 million. Couple that with MSN and Yahoo portal along with all the ancillary services like Yahoo Mail, Answers, Hotmail etc.. surely a lethal combination to compete against the Google-DoubleClick merger.

This will be fun to dissect and compare as we move forward on this news.

Tags: Web 2.0 and Beyond by Startup Addict