Open Source entrepreneur

Zoli took me to the third Tech Crunch meetup.

It was very interesting. A lot of Web 2.0 companies where presenting and demoing their technology.
Among them were Sphere, Meebo, Healthline, Wink, Flock, Pandora, Zvents, Loomia, Goowy, RealTravel, TailRank, MeasureMap. Most of them revolve around the blog / bloggers sphere.

The Web 2.0 business model is scary. None of these companies have a clear plan for revenue. It seems like most of the Web 2.0 companies are think tanks or research-oriented technologies whose only goal is to be purchased by a big Web portal (google, yahoo, etc).

Sphere, Wink, Flock, Zvents, TailRank are all about blogs and similar user-contributed content.
I couldn't see any method other than advertising to generate revenue. When you only have 3 big players for the advertising market today -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- the only exit is a purchase.
The key for these companies seems to be user adoption. The more users they have and the bigger their community is the more likely they will be able to get some value out of it.

Pandora and Loomia are about podcasting and music, both very interesting and complementary technology.

Goowy is a MS Exchange killer using Macromedia Flash. It looks good, but with free open source players like Zimbra, Hula, Open Exchange, Kolab, RoundCube they have serious competition.

Meebo is an interesting technology for a web based instant messaging system, but it's not currently building a community of users, so I am not sure what their plans are.

RealTravel is a user-contributed travel guide -- very nice, with a clever way to build traffic with high quality user-contributed content. But I see it as a niche market.

Healthline was probably the best technology I've seen. Especially after listening to Adam Bosworth (Google VP of Engineering) talking about upcoming new types of searches (such as medical searches). It's an intelligent and tool-rich search for health-related information. It reminds me of a company I saw at the Santa Barbara Tech Coast Angel presentation.

MeasureMap is a web traffic report for Blogs. The user interface is very nice.

I've learned a lot by looking at these technologies. There are a lot of good ideas and user interface tricks among them, especially in terms of UI, as seen in MeasureMap.

It comforts me to see that we have a good business model with revenue as well as all the components necessary to be part of this Web 2.0 trend.

I would like to thank Michael for putting together such an event; it was great to be able to meet amazing entrepreneurs and smart VCs in such a casual atmosphere.