bubble-20

Could Henry Blodget be a $15 billion liability? Easy

Nick Douglas · 09/29/06 01:55PM

Amazon's stock will hit $400, predicted analyst Henry Blodget in 1998. It didn't. The stock now trades at $32.14, but Blodget got attention and a job at Merrill Lynch. Never mind that he was a journalist by trade, with no analyst training. One dot-com bomb later, Merrill let him go, Eliot Spitzer charged him with securities fraud (he settled), and the "analyst" was banned from the securities industry for life.

Flock CEO leaves the fold

Nick Douglas · 09/13/06 11:23AM

Pop quiz: What does a once-popular startup, top-heavy with philosophy and lacking direction, do when the one guy who started the whole thing quits?

How to be a Silicon Valley cynic

Nick Douglas · 09/11/06 07:57PM

You're still "post-modern"? Dude, that's so five ideologies ago. Don't worry, take this crash course in Silicon Valley cynicism and no one will know you're not a quasi-meta-pomo-pseudohipster just like the rest of us.

Two left feet: Why ChaCha will fail

Nick Douglas · 09/06/06 02:37PM

The second-surest sign of a doomed startup is how badly it gauges human behavior. (The first is how much BusinessWeek wrote about it.) The freshly launched ChaCha.com is about to prove this, five bucks at a time.

Other headlines include "Are Double Ds too big?" New startup pays creepy bloggers

Nick Douglas · 09/06/06 01:22PM

Most startup launches are embarrassing enough without details. When Thisisby.us announced it was starting "the first major Web 2.0 application to incentivize an entire blogging community," it looked like any other doomed little content-based site paying pennies for blog posts no one wanted to read anyway. (And we all know Gawker Media cornered that market years ago.)

To-Do tonight: Every time someone reinvents semantic folksonomies, do a shot

Nick Douglas · 08/31/06 07:45PM
  • No toil nor trouble at tonight's first Bubble Thursday in San Fran. While the crowd will be fun (Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale! Vlogger Irina Slutsky! The Technorati crew! Valleywag!) the tone won't be too bubbly — no open bar, much less chocolate fountains and corporate strippers. (Granted, if you give host Kevin Burton a twenty, he'll stuff it in his underwear. Honest.) [Upcoming, photo by Zach Stern]

Bubble sign #4815: Content sites going public

Nick Douglas · 08/21/06 02:21PM

In 1996, when the tech boom was still ramping up, Wired Ventures already proved that content outlets would miss out on the money. The company dropped its IPO plans after investors backed off. Wired, unable to pay its bills, had to sell itself off piecemeal. Lesson learned: Content may be king, but only in the sense that the Queen rules the UK.

TechCrunch speaker spent $51 million in first bubble

Nick Douglas · 08/08/06 12:41PM

TechCrunch, the popular tech blog and clearinghouse for dot-com news, today runs a 24-minute documentary on Web 2.0. TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington says Scott Milener had the idea. Milener, the CEO of a search startup called Browster, also speaks in the video.

A word about rooftop parties

Nick Douglas · 07/24/06 11:02PM

Did everyone else take crazy pills, or can I get an amen about the myth of the rooftop party event horizon?