Is Meebo worth the same as Bear Stearns (BSC)?

Another crazy day on Wall Street, another crazy valuation being shopped around in the valley! According to TechCrunch, Meebo, a no-download chat platform combining access to the most popular instant messaging clients is aiming for a $250MM valuation in their latest round.
Don't get me wrong, Meebo is an exciting company and with AOL opening up AIM they might even have a chance to become legitimate (an AOL insider tells me Meebo isn't exactly liked in Dulles, VA). But the same amount that JP Morgan Chase paid for Bear Stearns yesterday - that seems ludicrous to me. Then again, the guys at Meebo probably don't have billions of toxic CDOs tucked away in the server room!

Social gaming is the evolution of casual online gaming

Mashable last week has a good post covering the emerging field of social gaming that companies like zynga, and SGN are aspiring to dominate. Zynga etc. are the natural evolution of first gen online casual gaming companies like Oberon Media; whereas Oberon went to portals (MSN) for distribution, Zynga etc. go to the social networks. As far as I know, one of the issues that Oberon is/was constantly facing is that the margins on these games get thinner and thinner as the traffic owner (portal/social network) and the game developer ask for increasingly larger shares of the revenues.
It'll be interesting to see whether they can work out rev-share models that make it attractive enough for all parties (developer, zynga etc., social network) to work together and provide value (read: ways to kill time) to consumers on social networks. Another interesting company in this space is Bunchball which offers a suite of products to help site owners drive engagement through games, rankings and avatars.
As someone on the social network site here at Takkle I'm excited about all of these coming to market as they are developing interesting applications to plug into our network and thus serve our users.

The New York Times is now totally 2.0

Over the last three days I've clicked on three links to NY Times articles that friends of mine have either posted in their Gtalk status or on Facebook. I myself have posted NY Times content on Facebook before which is super easy with their integration. It seems to me that the times is really catching on to the new content distribution models and thus creating lots of valuable page impressions. I may be biased because a lot of my network is in NYC - but the Times is the only one I regularly receive links for. I'm a big fan of good journalism and this to me is a clear indication for the continuing survival of such in the digital ages.

Say good-bye to the user-generated-content hype

A search on Youtube for Mentos and Coca Cola comes back with 9,000 search results - welcome to the world of "User-generated-content." Do we really need all these great videos or the 2,320 results for "lonelygirl"? The best content on Youtube et al is still produced professionally by companies like Viacom, NBC, ABC or Fox.
Granted, there's the occasional user-generated success such as Geriatric 1927 but most of the good stuff comes from our favorite big-company producers.
The same applies to journalism - most of the successful blogs have morphed into professional networks or standalone companies - not much "user-generated" anymore. My point is - good content costs money to produce and people are willing to pay for good content (in the form of money or consuming ads). The ease of putting text, audio or video online has definitely led to increased creativity and freedom of expression online - but the day where user-generated takes over the world is still far far away. In the previous boom companies like theglobe.com and Geocities already allowed users to create a ton of content - 99.999% of which is long forgotten.

Could Wall Street end the new .com party?

It's 2007 and there are a bunch of no-revenue, good idea, 2.0 Internet startups out there that haven't really spend too much time thinking about their business model. The secret (or not so secret) hope is still that Google or Yahoo will come in with a bag full of cash. Henry Blodget the famed former analyst who predicted Amazon at $600 has an interesting opinion on how a Wall Stret crash could end the party. It would definitely deflate some of the valuations (Youtube anyone?) but probably not have a major impact. For you startups out there- think about the revenue model, not the Goohoo money.

Great Web2.0 Description

Love it. Thanks to Fabrice for posting

Good post on vertical strategies

Just found this piece by a so-far-unknown-to-me Aussie blogger: Verticals discussed as expansion models from various angles. Good reading!