Gawker: valleywag, startup ideas

Startup idea #2090: Buy Alleywag.com

Nick Douglas — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 19:07:09 EDT

Blow! Blow! The tech bubble's still not big enough! Enterprising New Yorker Paul Maiorana is selling Alleywag.com, the perfect trademark infringer for Valleywag Startup Idea #2090: A gossip site about New York City's Silicon Alley (home of DoubleClick and iVillage).

Today, Paul pitched the domain to Gawker Media boss Nick Denton and Weblogs, Inc. boss Jason Calacanis (founder of the now-defunct Silicon Alley Reporter). Jason "doesn't do gossip" and Denton's too cheap to buy another domain, so it's yours for the taking — just make an offer to PMaiorana at Gmail.

Silicon Alley [Wikipedia]

Fleck eBays Web 2.0 business plans

Nick Douglas — Mon, 08 May 2006 12:13:08 EDT

Fleck.com, a Web-2.0-licious startup with the "1. Be coy, 2. ???, 3. Profit!" business plan, put four businesses on the block today. But Fleck is to a business incubator what a microwave is to a French kitchen. Each available business is just a domain name and a concept — but at starting bids of a buck each, what a deal!

But talk about the Uncanny Valley — these startups are just realistic enough to be scary. Drugle — tagline "Sex, Drugle.com, and Rock 'n' Roll" — is a health search, Betafy collects willing beta users, and so on. And Fleck blogger Boris says he can pop these things off like nobody's business.

Headr.com, Betafy.com, Clicksy.com and Drugle.com [Fleck Blog]

To-Do this weekend: DevHouse and Startup School

ndouglas — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:39:00 EDT

This is the weekend you make your first billion.

Saturday morning: Learn the 12-step plan for leaving the cubicle farm and running a startup at Startup School 2006 (Upcoming).
Saturday night: Write the app the world needs at SuperHappyDevHouseNine (Upcoming).
Sunday: Get some women at this weekend's taco fest (graphically coined by Min Jung Kim), Women 2.0 (Upcoming).
Tuesday: Schmooze with the VCs at Draper Fisher Jurvetson's New Technology Meetup (Upcoming).
Wednesday morning: ???
Thursday: Profit!

Naming the babies: Name your startup after a Finn

ndouglas — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:52:38 EDT

After he met some Finns, SuperHappyDevHouse organizer David Weekly pointed out to me that Finnish names are "very Web 2.0." It's true! The list of Finnish names (with pronunciations!) is a goldmine of Web 2.0 monikers and an invaluable resource for any startup. After all, Web 2.0 sites like Riya are already banking on the cuteness of a first name, and Ikea's been naming its furniture after Swedish locations for years.

Each Finnish name cries to be attached to a certain sort of Web 2.0 startup. So try these names, with the recommended services they could define:

Tytti: Social porn
Miika: Web-based enterprise software
Per: Peer-to-peer micro-loans
Jali: Social bookmarking. In pink
Yrjö: Distributed gossip tracker
Riku: Community blog
Saari: Outsourced customer service
Atso: MMORPG currency market
Daavid: Some kind of Yahoo Maps mashup

Finnish names [saunalahti.fi]

Startup Idea #59: dot-com IKEA assembly

ndouglas — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:09:41 EST

Community site publisher Bryght happened to get a web-geek IKEA installer at their Vancouver office. This guy explains how he built his site, AssembleNow.com, in twenty-five minutes and got his first customer in a half hour. What a quick startup time. Granted, a furniture assembly gig isn't prime VC material, but someone should bring this guy to the Valley, where every client is an office full of Web 2.0 guys too lazy to build a bookcase.