As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we wish you a merry Christmas and happy holidays and a happy new year. If you wonder, you can follow Santa on Christmas Eve on Google Maps.

As 2009 ends and 2010 begins, we wish you a merry Christmas and happy holidays and a happy new year. If you wonder, you can check how Christmas buzz is taking shape and what products are being talked about on the web in this Mashable post.

The first ever Gov 2.0 Summit was held in Washington,DC; in September 2009. The summit brought together leaders from the private, public and government sector to find better ways of dispensing information.

Eric Ries from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was one of the speakers at Gov 2.0 Summit. In the video below, Eric Ries is sharing his wide experience about creating “Lean Startups” by “Doing More with Less” as both a former entrepreneur and a VC advisor.

Eric Ries became a Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, after co-founding and serving as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Bunchball, FooMojo, Causes and KaChing.

This is an old but unmissable funny poem, “If i controlled the Internet” from storyteller, writer and slam poet Rives; which he read at Ted conference in 2006. In this poem, Rives told he wanted to see a more personal and more  Internet and 3 years later the Internet has become much more personal, much more about me.

What would you do, if you controlled the Internet?

* You can find the whole text of the poem below the video.

If I controlled the internet?

You could auction your broken heart on Ebay
Take the money, go to Amazon,
Buy a phonebook for a country you’ve never been to
Call folks at random until you find someone
who flirts really well in a foreign language

If I were in charge of the internet
You could Mapquest your lover’s moodswings
Hang left at cranky
Right at preoccupied
U turn on silent treatment
All the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin’
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection
Some days I’m as shallow as a backing pan
But I still stretch miles in all directions

If I own the internet
Napster Monster and Friendster-dot-com would be one big website
That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job
and you’re really just chatting with your palls,

Heck if I ran the web
You could email dead people
They would not email you back
But you’d get an automated reply
Their name in your inbox
It’s all you wanted anyway
And a message saying: ‘Hey, it’s me. I miss you.’
Listen you’ll see, being dead is dandy.

Now you go back to raising kids
And waging peace
And craving candy

If I designed the internet
Childhood-dot-com would be a loop
Of a boy
In an orchard
With a ski pole for a sword
Trashcan lid for a shield, shouting
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
Now follow me OK

Grandma-dot-com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit bath instructions 1-2-3
That links with hot-diggity-dog-dot-com, that is my grandfather
They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage-dot-dad
He forms an attachment to kind-a-ditsy-but-still-sends-ginger-snatch-for-Christmas-dot-mom who
Downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges who grows up to be

Me,
The guy who usually goes too far, so

If I were the emperor of the internet
I guess I’d still be mortal, huh?
But at that point I would probably already have
The lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis, so
I would outlaw spam on my first day in office
I wouldn’t need it.
I’d be like some kind of internet genius.
And me,
I’d like to upgrade to deity and maybe
Just like that

(p-o-p)

I’d go wireless.

Huh.

Maybe google would hire this
So I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus
Until the worldwideweb is as wise as wild and as organised
As I think a modern day miracle-slash-oracle can get, but
Oooooooooo, you wanna bet just how whack and un-p.c. your Mac or PC’s gonna be when I’m rockin’

hot-shit-hotshot-God-dot-net?

I guess it’s just like life

It’s not a question of if you can
Its, ‘Do ya?’
We can interfere with the interface
We can make you god hallelujah the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we logon
You don’t say a prayer
You don’t write a song
You don’t chant an ooooohm

You send one blessed email to
Whoever you’re thinking of
At
Dadeladatatatatatatadadeladedadeladedatatam-dot-com

There’s no doubt that YouTube is the biggest player in online video industry. YouTube outperformed its competitors and has become a winner in video sharing. YouTube is one of  the most succesful web stories of all time, since 2006 and still growing very fast.

When Google acquired Youtube for $ 1.65 B, Google was criticized for paying huge amount of money for a website without a business model. Everybody except Google was thinking that YouTube was overvalued. Video sharing sites have the biggest costs in Internet World. They need really fast servers and huge storage space and the bandwith costs are the highest. Because of the high costs, ROI (return of investment) of online video businesses are very slow. It’s hard to monetize broadband video and the only ways to monetize this type of business are showing ads and subscription.

According to the YouTube Blog, YouTube’ s 1 minute is worth 20 hours. In mid-2007, 6 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute and in January ’09 it grew to 15 hours per minute. Now,  20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and we’ll see 24 hours – a day’s worth of video uploaded to YouTube, very soon.

YouTube dominates the statistics of online video industry, but doesn’t make Google any money. YouTube streams more than 5 billions videos in a month but less than 5 percent of those videos have ads.  YouTube serves one-third of  all online videos. Industry experts predicts US Online Video Ad Spending as $ 750 M in 2009 and rising to $ 5.8 B in 2013.  Undoubtedly, YouTube will get a big part of this pie if it’ll survive. YouTube’s operational costs are rising and bandwith costs are estimated about $ 470 M for this year alone. Day by day, it’s getting harder and more expensive for Google to support YouTube.

Hulu, a smaller and newer competitor of YouTube made a head-to-head US revenue (about $90 M) with YouTube. Hulu is focusing on exclusively on professional content and held by NBC Universal, News Corp and Disney which are also very important video producers for television. Hulu’s advantage is its professional content without copyright problems. But because of some copyright restricitons, Hulu is a U.S. only service. YouTube proves that there’s a big market for user-generated content but Hulu shows us that advertisers want to spend money for professional content.

* YouTube had more than 77 million unique visitors in April when Hulu had about 7 million unique visitors.

Industry experts estimate  an average value of $15 CPM for video sites and $40 CPM for focused video sites like Hulu and Heavy.

Other video sites will never be able to grow as much as YouTube, but their revenue can surpass YouTube’s in the future. YouTube (and Google) must find a way to monetize its content effectively and reduce the costs. I think the only way to do is to serve more professional content as quickly as possible and find an innovative way to monetize user-generated content. Maybe, sharing the revenue gained from user-generated content with the users who created the  content can increase the quality and the chance of the user-generated content to get ads.

It’s true that YouTube has mind blowing satistics and  the third most popular website in the world. YouTube’s one minute is worth 20 hours; but we really wonder how much is YouTube’s one minute worth in US $?

The first Web 2.0 EXPO of 2009 has begun in San Fransisco, CA. Because of the recession the Expo is downsized; the number of attendees was more than 10,000 last year and this year about 8,000 attendees are expected.

I think the hot topics of the Expo will be:

- Less is More – The art of staying less expensive and more efficient
- Goverment 2.0 & How Obama used and will use the Web 2.0
-Will Twitter be able to have a revenue model? & Using Twitter in business for profit
-Using Web 2.0 as a tool to cut costs

Despite economic situation, the Web 2.0 Expo is alive and still one of the most important events in the IT industry. The Expo’s theme “The Power of Less” expresses the benefits of using Web 2.0 based collaborative tools for cost saving.

If you can’t attend and still wonder wha’s going on Web 2.0 Expo like me, you should check the its website after the Expo. We’d appreciate O’Reilly & TechWeb sharing the keynote video and presentation slides from all events they organize in the way of Web 2.0 .

As i mentioned in an old post before, Angelsoft is a New York based company which has become an online ecosystem where investors and entrepreneurs meet to build new companies. Due to its name, Angelsoft was about Angel Investors.After they released version 3.0 , their platform became easier but more powerful. With version 3.4 release, Angelsoft is welcoming VCs into the Angelsoft Network.They’ve launched new power features that can help the venture capitalists streamline the process easier. As it happened in all releases, the interfaces are ipmroved and lots of bugs fixed.

2008 Stats

Angelsoft is an alive and transparent platform and has lots of transactions, so the stats from Angelsoft are reliable enough to represent the industry. I think the most important stat is “invested submissions rate” . As you see, very small number of companies  who apply get funded. This shows how hard being an entrepreneur is. Getting an investment doesn’t mean that you will be successful. The success rate of a startup is very low, too. Half of the startups fail within two years and then the others in the next three years. Average four year – survival rate of a startup is under 40% . There are 442 angel groups and VCs and 14,900 investors in the Angelsoft Ecosystem and Angelsoft processes over 2,100 funding applications a month. Since May 2008, 37,000 + deals made, about 2,000 events occured, 150,000 documents attached.

Doubling Investor Community Activity

One of the most important need of the entrepreneurs is promoting their plans to the investor community. Angelsoft listened to them and took steps to help them out which resulted in a doubling of the number of views that the Investors receive. The feedback form both investors and entrepreneurs have been positive as well which means a win-win situation. Investors now receive an email bi-weekly with the 5 closest and 5 highest rated deals.

Industry Valuations

As the graph at the above shows, the average amount of funds being sought differs between 25% – 35% of the pre-money valuation estimated by entrepreneurs for their companies. The graph also shows us that the valuation is decreasing but the rate of the funds sought is increasing. This means,

• The prices are getting down in the early stage investment industry,
• Entrepreneurs are aready to share more of their companies with the investors.

Conclusion

These new features are a major step forward in improving the funding process for entrepreneurs and investing process for investors. These days, you can see angel investors and VCs coinvesting on deals more often. Both the VCs and angels need each other and this relationship will be more important in the future. It’s a smart action to bring VCs on board and Angelsoft platfrom has become a better place for entrepreneurs and angel investors to be able to meet more people.

* All the data and the images used in this article are the property of Angelsoft.

A startup company is a company with a limited operating history. These companies are the newly created and are in a phase of operational and marketing research & development. They need time, money, customers and most importantly ambitious, stress-resistant and challenger entrepreneurs.

The feeling of starting and growing a new business is unique and inalienable. When starting a business,  an entrepreneur dreams of changing something, achieving success and leave a permanent mark on the world. It’s a really hard task to complete! Every entrepreneur want to grow their businesses in a short time. But the first thing you need is patience. Sometimes many slow & small steps are better for you than fast & big steps. Don’t forget that “cities grow from towns and towns from villages” . Nobody wants to live in a fast-growing but slummy city!

Eric Karjaluoto is the author of the blog ideasonideas and one of the founders of MakeFive. In his “Why Your Web Startup Will Fail” post, he tells the why your startup will fail based upon their MakeFive story. These six titles are cited in this post:

- You won’t have an audience
- You’re going to run out of cash
- You’ll get frustrated
- The emotional rollercoaster will beat you
- You’ll get excited about something else
- But it won’t be because of the competition

This post is worth reading and a must for entrepreneurs to learn the causes to take action for not failing. Internet is an endless source for entrepreneurs to learn from their experiences and their failures. In fact, a failing is the best way for learning not to fail again but it’s the most painful, too. If you value your time and your startup, please read & learn why others fail(ed) and i wish you won’t fail…

LeWeb is the largest Web event where “Web People” meet in Europe and one of the largest in the world. This year’s LeWeb is on December 9-10th. LeWeb started in 2005 and this fifth edition is in Paris, too. LeWeb helps attendees to meet the speakers, entrepreneurs to meet investors; LeWeb enables web people to enlarge their networks. The sponsor list including Google, Nokia, Facebook, Swisscom, TechCrunch… shows the importance of this event.

The Startup Competition
The Startup Competition event is an important part of the LeWeb event. The Startup Competition enables the startups to present themselves in front of investors and advisors. Seedcamp, the competition sponsor of LeWeb reviewed each applicant project, scored and have selected 30 top companies for the competition. Each companies will have 7 minutes to present their applications in the first day of LeWeb. Three winners will have a chance to present on the main stage in the second day.

The selected companies are (in alphabetical order):

1.    2Win-Solutions – FRANCE
2.    3scale networks S. L. – SPAIN
3.    Apture – USA
4.    Box.net, Inc. – USA
5.    Brozengo SA – FRANCE
6.    Charge Ventures – Malta
7.    Cmune – CHINA
8.    ConTrust – ISRAEL
9.    DoctorSIM – SPAIN
10.  Edicy – ESTONIA
11.  Haploid – FRANCE
12.  IZI-collecte – FRANCE
13.  Kaltura – USA
14.  MyID.is Certified – FRANCE
15.  Nimbuzz – NETHERLANDS
16.  Popego Inc. – USA
17.  Producteev Inc. – USA
18.  Publing – FRANCE
19.  Radionomy – BELGIUM
20.  Samedi GmbH – GERMANY
21.  ShoutEm Ltd. – CROATIA
22.  Silentale SAS – FRANCE
23.  SquareClock – FRANCE
24.  Tellmewhere – FRANCE
25.  Trendiction – LUXEMBURG
26.  Viewdle, Inc – UKRAIN
27.  Webnode.com – CZECH REPUBLIC
28.  Zavedenia.com – BULGARIA
29.  Zipipop Ltd (Zipiko) – FINLAND
30.  Zoover Holiday Reviews – NETHERLANDS

Winning this competition is worthwhile; on the other hand, having an opportunity to participate in this competition is very important.

This year; the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit took place November 5-7, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. Web 2.0 Summit is a conference where Web Industry discusses today’s Web’s challenges and opportunities and the Web’s future. The Web 2.0 Summit connects the leaders and technologists opening the Web’s business opportunities.

The theme for this year wasn’t just about the Internet. This year’s motto was “Web Meets World” .

Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry.

• Over 70 thought leaders and entrepreneurs slated to present in an interactive format stressing audience participation
• More than a dozen extraordinary thinkers and business leaders presented “High Order Bits” – ten minute stand-and-delivered presentations designed to provoke, delight, and amaze the audience.
• Top executives from platform businesses addressed the future of the Web in plenary sessions
• Experts focuses on innovative new web technologies in their expert led-workshops
• A variety of unique networking events including receptions, dinners and evening parties happened.

Al Gore, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, John Heilemann,Michael Goguen Michael Pollan and Mark Zuckerberg were some of the speakers from inside and outside of the Internet Industry. John Heilemann lead a panel on ‘The Web and Politics’. The main subject was ‘the role of the Internet in Obama’ s victory’. GoodGuide, a startup that rates consumer products by their goodness won the Launchpad – startup contest.

We must thank O’Reilly and TechWeb for organizing this summit for five years. The content gets more quality each year. All presentations, videos and other rich content can be reached on O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 2008 site. We will be waiting for Web 2.0 Summit 2009 with impatience.

This video is about a conversation between Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo and John Battelle, founder of Federated Media.  Battelle asked hardcquestions about Microsoft and Google deals and Jerry Yang sometimes answered  sincerely and sometimes denied. Much more videos can be found on O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 2008 site.

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0 Wiki.

Web 1.0 was about web pages linking to web pages. Web 2.0 is a transform, web pages to web applications.  The next generation of the web is Web 3.0 – the semantic web.

The Web 3.0 will be mashups of applications with artificial intelligence. The control of the Internet will go out off our hands and the web itself will control the Internet.

The Web 3.0 Expo will be at October 16-17 in Santa Clara, CA. At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo; the strategies, tools, technologies and the big ideas necessary for building impactful, socially relevant, and profitable Web 3.0 products, services and companies will be explored. Featured sessions include:

• Monetization Implications of Web 3.0 (Semantic Advertising, etc.)
• Raising Capital For Next Generation Companies
• Semantic Search Technologies
• From Web 2.0 to 3.0 – Tales from the Trenches
• Business Risks of Web 3.0 …

The nature of software development is changing. Now we have different platforms like PC, web and phone to run the same software. The Internet has been changing the rules of software development radically, too. Especially, the Web 2.0 revolution gives us new eays to communicate and work together as a team.

Microsoft has many software development platforms which are used  by majority of developers. If you’ re a developer of Microsoft Platforms or a software architect; you might have been heard about PDC before. If you haven’t heard it; let me explain. MS Professional Developers Conference is Microsoft’s annual gathering of leading developers and software architects. At PDC, you’ll learn about MS’s upcoming products, future projects. You’ll be able to meet Microsoft executives, engineers and other experts. You’ll have a chance to think about the software’ s future. Windows 7 will also be available to for the first time for attendees at the PDC conference.

Who Should Attend (or… The PDC is for YOU)

The PDC is designed for leading-edge developers and software architects. If you’re interested in the future of the Microsoft platform, you’re responsible for the technical strategy in your organization, or you’re a highly skilled developer who likes to delve deep into the heart of the platform, then the PDC is for you!

If you want to attend PDC 2008, this year it’s at “Los Angeles Convention Center” at October 27 – 30…

As social networks take more time in our lives, we’re starting to feel The Internet’s physical impacts on our daily lives. Today, the gap between the living standarts of  developed countries and undeveloped countries, continues to widen. Social networking hepls us to know about the undeveloped countries more than past. Some smart people use social bookmarking as a tool to reach the whole world to tell what people living in undeveloped countries need.

Nowadays, twitter is a very popular for social networking and also popular for social responsibility projects. This is called “Twitting For Charity”.  Twitter co-founder Biz STONE has talked about this new way for charity in his September newsletter.

First example is Mashable ‘s “The Well That Twitter Built” project. Mashable ‘s founder and CEO Pete CASHMORE told his followers about Charity:Water, an initiative to build wells in Ethiopia.

“On September 18th 2008, Mashable’s Twitter followers donated $3536 to Charity:Water, an initiative to build wells in Ethiopia. On the same day, our Twitter friend Paul Young raised a further $637 through his Twitter and Facebook accounts. And Twitter user Sarah Townsend hauled in $400 – that’s more than $4500, almost exclusively from Twitter, in a single day. With $4000 buying an entire well to supply water to 200 people for 20 years, we can truly call this the “well that Twitter built”.” says Pete CASHMORE…
The second example is Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian, a heart surgeon using his Internet marketing business to fund heart surgery for under-privileged children having “Congenital Heart Defects” in India. In August-September every year, Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian holds a 24-hour day and night blogging marathon called Tweet-a-thon Dr. Mani has founded Children Heart Foundation which hepls children to get heart surgeon. In India, a heart surgeon is not as expensive as in US. Each operation costs between 2500 – 3000 $. He’s seeking donations and making conributions from his growing Internet business.

2500 children die every day from congenital heart defects. 1 in 4 of them lives in India. With early detection and treatment, almost all of them will be completely cured.

These two examples show us the power of The Internet via Social Networking to change the world we live. Social responsiblity must be one of the results of an adequate social network. We must thank Pete CASHMORE and Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian for showing us the way to use a social network as a tool to change the world and make better.

This post is about the power of social networking (virtual communities) to change the world and dedicated to Blog Action Day .

Web 2.0 Expo Ny ’08 is going on at its third day and the official photos shown on Flickr. You can reach all the gallery here.

Attendees in the audience during the "Customer Service is the New Marketing" session with Lane Becker at Web 2.0 Expo NY 2008

Web 2.0 Expo is an annual gathering of business professionals who are building the next generation web. There are four Web 2.0 Expos in a year; San Fransisco and New York is for U.S. and Europe and Tokyo for non U.S. San Fransisco’s Web 2.0 Expo ’08 was in April. The next location for Web 2.0 Expo is New York. NY Expo happens, September 16-19,08 at the Javits Center.

Web 2.0 Expo features the most innovative and successful Internet industry figures and companies providing attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web 2.0 world to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities. Web 2.0 Expo is co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media.

Web 2.0 Expo is focusing on 4 four conversations: education, tradeshow, networking and launch pad.

There will be a chance four all attenders to connect with other participants on Web 2.0 topics that you want to discuss on Web2Open platform. It’s a great way to share your experiences, to build new networks and maybe to present your project for free.

If you have a chance to attend Web 2.0 Expo, you musn’t pass it up…