I find it an increasingly worrying trend to find more and more startups openly admitting that they don’t know how they will make money yet but expect to figure it out later. Perhaps even more worrying is that these startups are getting funded. Notable examples recently include:

Geni - as admitted by CEO David Sacks on the GigaOM Show.
Clipmarks (which recently got […]

We all know that the P2P loans startup Lending Club grew remarkably quickly because it launched on the Facebook platform but given that it now runs on its own site, I am wondering what Facebook gained from hosting and more or less incubating Lending Club.
I ask because unlike many of the applications on Facebook, Lending […]

There are a number of fairly new web applications out there that have caught my attention. Each of them appears to be very useful in its own right but in my opinion if they were all combined into one super product, the whole could indeed be much greater than the sum of the parts. The […]

I see two fundamental problems with companies that I call startups for startups (SFSs), i.e. startups like Cambrian House, Cofoundr, Spigit, Startup Addicts etc that exist apparently to help other startups or people with ideas for startups. Typically, these companies (usually websites) enable their members to post business ideas online and have other members comment on […]

As more and more startups launch on an advertising-only revenue model (i.e. offer products/services for free to generate traffic and make money from ads), an idea occurs to me of how competition might evolve in the wonderful world of the Internet over the next few years.
Given that many of these ad-supported web apps operate in the same […]

Over the last month or so I have come across Spigit (a startup for startups) a few times. On each occasion I have admittedly been in a hurry, but each write up I read on the company, including those from the its own FAQs page, left me not much the wiser about what exactly Spigit was offering. I […]

I am avid reader of tech blogs and follower of most things Web 2.0 but I realised recently that I tend to ignore posts or news relating to the following:

Digg - just never got into it.
User Generated Video - I tend only to be interested in videos about startups and the occasional comedy clip sent to me […]

I got an email from a microPledge.com today - an invitation to their pre-launch website. Apparently I had pre-registered my interest in their site but I only vaguely remember visiting it once. The idea behind the site is a good one I think: If you want to see a piece of software developed, post it on […]

I read a great post by the Tim O’Reilly a while back about how banks could do much more good with the data they have on us by harnessing our collective intelligence Web 2.0 style. I remember thinking at the time that the banks would never do this because they are inherently complacent and usually too slow to do […]

A web application known as VoSnap is being developed as I write, by 70 or so people who have gathered for the sole purpose of starting up a web application and business in a single weekend. The crew includes developers, lawyers, marketing people etc.
For weeks leading up to the weekend, people were invited to suggest ideas for which product to […]