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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Clues: people I meet, mobile phones, twitter, crossed paths, social network, offline or online, exchange

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 [...]

This is probably best as a feature or widget rather than a product in its own right, but wouldn’t it be useful to be able to easily search a blog or other website for all posts or pages that you had previously viewed – sortable perhaps by viewed date? I have just spent almost half an hour trying to locate a post that I [...]

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 [...]

Mahalo – the latest and somewhat controversial entrant to the search engine space – is reported to employ about 40 editors who manually edit search results in order to provide spam-free and therefore better results for its users. I can’t help but think that these editors would be better utilised by allowing users to rate search results and [...]

In my previous post I described how I almost got fooled by a clever domain name scam. This has sparked yet another a business idea in my mind. What if a toolbar existed that allowed users to mark a site as running a scam. Other users on visiting the site would then immediately be alerted to this. Perhaps [...]