Anti-Social Networking

“Tired of phony online friends? Make enemies instead. Riding on the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, new Web sites are poking fun at online friendships that connect you to the people you like, by turning attention to the ones you don’t.

Over the past 18 months, sites such Snubster, Enemybook and Hatebook are appealing to Internet users who get a kick out of the tongue-in-cheek humor of mocking their friends and others who are just plain cynical.

‘I didn’t understand these fake-friend war chests that people were so busy building online,’ said Bryant Choung, a technology consultant who started Snubster last year.

‘I would get Facebook requests from people I talked to for three minutes at a bar or party, and now this person wants to go online to peruse all of my photos and contacts. I just didn’t get it,’ the 26-year-old added.

Read more at yahoo.com

Future of Ad Fads?

Deloitte & Touche survey looks at advertising potential of web, television, and mobile devices

“A survey conducted by Deloitte & Touche shows that of 2,081 consumers questioned, 38% watch television shows online, while 36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices, and 45% are creating online content such as websites, videos and blogs. The study, which was conducted between October 25-31 for American consumers, aims to look at the advertising potential of the web, television, and mobile devices.

Deloitte & Touche conducted the same survey between February 23 and March 6, 2007. The results indicate that there’s a steady growth in usage across the three sectors looked at, with varying increases depending on age demographics. Consumers age 25-41 saw the largest increase for mobile entertainment use, up 47%, while those in the 13-24 age bracket saw a similar 46% increase.”

Read more at mashable.com

The Google Engima

Is Google a model internet company — or an anomaly?

“This decade’s most re­markable business story has been the rise of Google from the dot-com ashes. The company didn’t even exist 10 years ago — it was incorporated by its founders, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, on September 7, 1998 — but it is today a juggernaut that is as feared as it is admired. The company’s growth has been dizzying, its revenues shooting up from less than US$500 million in 2002 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006. And despite a prolonged hiring binge, an aggressive acquisition program, and a multibillion-dollar investment in building data centers, Google remains robustly profitable, earning a net income of $2 billion on $7.5 billion of sales through the first half of 2007. Since the company’s initial public offering in August 2004, its stock price has risen fivefold.”

Read more at strategy-business.com

Beta testing continues

While I’m out of the office the development site has moved to http://rady.landermedia.com/. The home page is complete, as is the MBA home page and the FlexMBA section (no photos yet).

Happy Holidays!

Rady v4: Beta Testing Underway

It’s rough around the edges, content is missing, and most of the links aren’t working, but for those of us in the trenches it’s a proud moment: the demo of Rady v4 is live! Well, at least the home page is.

Check it out at http://rady.ucsd.edu/dev/v4/.

Drupal Developers Acquia Raise $7 Million (Mashable!)

Mark Hopkins reports:

Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind Drupal, the open-source content management system, decide to launch a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Today, Acquia, the company formed to pusue that effort, has gathered together a $7 million first round investment. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners as well as Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Buytaert put Acquia together to be “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.”

Read more at mashable.com

MyLifeBrand Powers New Network for Venture Capitalists

“The New England Venture Network has created an online component to its community called VentureNetwork, for the purpose of making communication amongst members that much easier. It makes sense. Isn’t that why we all turn to social networking in the first place? We join Facebook and find all sorts of high school and college friends that we haven’t spoken to in ages, and all those messaging tools and photo-sharing options make it so much easier for us to stay caught up on what’s going on in our friends’ lives, right?

Similar concepts are backing the reasoning behind NEVN’s new online network, which is being powered by MyLifeBrand. NEVN’s members, which include Vesbridge, Softbank Capital, Windspeed and Fidelity Partners, are encouraged to use this new network for staying caught up with news feeds, press releases, related articles, etc. From there, industry professionals can then carry on relevant discussions. This will include Q&A sessions with experts from across various fields, mainly focusing on law, accounting and marketing.”

Read more at mashable.com

Jobvite Raises $7.2M for Recruitment 2.0

“On-demand recruitment solution Jobvite has raised $7.2 million in Series A funding. Not too bad for its first round. With collaboration tools that work across several departments within a corporation, the transparent recruiting service aims to minimize the amount of work needed to find the right employees for your company.”

Read more at mashable.com.

Dominating the Cloud

“Some people may be antsy about the consolidation of the world’s computing power into the hands of a few companies, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt sure isn’t one of them. He believes that the cost and the sophistication of the kind of enormous network supercomputer that his company is building present huge barriers to entry for would-be competitors. In a new Business Week interview, Schmidt says that becoming a giant of computing ‘is our goal.’”

Read more at roughtype.com.

Rady.edu v4: First look

I wanted to give folks an immediate look at the current iteration of the v4 home page. I’ll be discussing some of the design challenges we’ve encountered in a later post.