September 14th, 2006
TechCrunch's Arrington shares his winners and losers
TechCruncher Mike Arrington opened the second day of The Future of Web Apps Summit with his picks of Web 2.0 winners and losers and gives advice to wouldbe startups. He also announced the next blog in the TechCrunch family, which will cover enterprise products.
Winners (got acquired): Writely, del.icio.us, Userplane, Flickr, Weblogs, Inc., Myspace, Bloglines, Truveo, Grouper, Skype, Newroo
Very good bets: Digg, Facebook YouTube, Photobucket, Zoho, Stumble Upon, Popsugar, PlentyofFish, Netvibes. Mike said he could be an executive at any of the companies, it would be Digg, which also drives 20 percent of TechCrunch traffic.
Ones to watch: Jobster, Riya, Zillow, Flock, Sharpcast, Rocketboom, 1-800-FREE411, oDesk, Second Life, WordPress
What were they thinking: Inform, Gather, PubSub, Browzor, Jigsaw, Squidoo
These are not necesarily loser companies, but I am not proud that they exist, Mike said.
Shared attributes of winners
- Passion for what they are doing
- Do something extraordinary
- Remove serious friction
- Great founder dynamics
- Never raise big money or raise it after you have won
- Perfect revenue model is not required
- Launched with post on TechCrunch
Shared attributes of losers
- Poor founder, team choices
- Lifestyle/ego entrepreneurs
- Raised too much money
- Spent too much money
- Over business-planned
- Forget about scaling
- Launched with post on TechCrunch
Market saturation
Avoid: Social networking, social bookmarking, video, photos, blogging/podcasting platforms, portal/homepages, feed readers
Big potential: Platforms, desktop apps (ported to online), office efficiency, cloud storage, identity, developer tools, market destruction (such as 1-800-FREE411), enterprise
Mike also talked up Adobe’s Apollo platform, claiming that new classes of companies will be launched on this new platform, which will let applications written for Adobe’s Flash presentation software run without a Web browser. Apollo is due out next year as a free download.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
