16
August
2006
|
23:18 PM
America/Los_Angeles

BizDev 2.0, TechCrunch bidding, plus lotsa tweaks

by Richard Koman for



RedHat was a no-show at LinuxWorld, leaving most vendors and attendees scratching their heads, all the more so because Novell had a huge booth near the entrance promoting new SUSE products ... Yahoo is leaving its mark on del.ici.ous with a new homepage featuring thumbnails and "tags to watch" and contextual ads. Steve Rubel finds it dicey to screw around with techies' core web service but notes "there are no contextual ads on del.icio.us tag pages yet. However, I am sure that Yahoo will soon move to monetize these pages since they are prime real estate on certain keywords." The idea of course is that it won't be just for techies for much longer .... Google has updated GoogleTalk with voicemail, file and folder sharing and music status. I guess that's cool but G is so far behind the major chat players, not sure how many people care ...

BizDev 2.0


Flickr's Caterina Fake has a line on the 2.0 way to do business around here. Build it, then negotiate.

Several companies -- probably more than a dozen -- have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal -- and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that's customer service, and BizDev 2.0.


Cap'n TechCrunch



The bidding for tickets to tomorrow's TechCrunch August Capital deal is at $310, bid by eBay users ronsheridan (possibly this Ron Sheridan). That's because the RSVP list is locked at 700 people and demand to get into the 2.0 event of the summer is bigger than that. Seems like I've been here before ...

2.0 apps are great but it's not the be-all-end-all, hm? TechCrunch's Michael Arrington set up a Wiki to handle reservations but conceded: "The wiki is overwhelmed and is frustrating people because it is constantly locked. I apologize. I hate wasting people's time and I can imagine how frustrating it must be to sit there and hit "refresh". All of those "refreshes" are also crushing our servers." The Chronicle's Al Saracevic is amused:

To leverage the popularity of the movement, the ticket auction has generated bids over $300 apiece, with all the money generated going to help a charity ... that helps entrepreneurs! Like we need more 2.0 carpetbaggers starting photo sharing sites around here??