A judge in a Boston, MA federal court didn't think that ConnectU had enough evidence to back up their case that Mark Zuckerber had nabbed business plan from ConnectU during their undergrad days to start Facebook. The plaintiffs were sent back home. No reps from Facebook even border to go to the hearing. Looking back I think I must have had shared at least a couple hundred of business ideas during my grad school days, I better try to find out if any of my classmates is making big money from them. Hmmm
Party-hearty social networking site Going.com is currently trying to figure out how to spend a newly raised $5 million from General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital. That’s a lot of money for real partying.
Twitter is sucking up more investment money from Union Square Ventures despite they have no idea of how to make money or any early signs of future profitability. Anyone has some idea of how they can make money pls share with me?
Back to the valley, the latest social networks startup is Pownce, founded by Kevin Rose, the co-founder and chief architect of Digg. Pownce allows you to send text messages to individual friends or groups, post microblogs, or short announcements, to the larger community. This is very similar to Twitter or Jaiku. What makes it special is the combination of private messaging and file sharing.
A company called MOO (Disclosure: I have nothing to do with it although it is similiar to my last name) that produces mini cards and stickers, is showing everyone that with enough creativity even "offline" business can participate in the Web 2.0 thing. By partnering with social networks such as Flickr, Bebo, Habbo, Vox, Fotolog, LiveJournal and SecondLife, MOO is playing smart. Customers that have accounts on those sites are highly facilitated when it comes to creating their MOO cards, since they can just utilize their existing photo collection, already uploaded to their preferred social networking site. They have great stuff. I am ordering mine today. They are so cool. No one should ever need to go to print those ugly boring business cards from Staples ever again. Companies should start thinking about integrating Web 2.0 with the real world.
