A couple of interesting items from lunchtime browsing:
Stowe Boyd: Advisory Capital: A New Basis For Strategic Involvement. Argues for a new model of funding startups. Makes sense to me – the VC route is filled with potholes and speedbumps.
There has been a great deal of discussion in the tech community about the changing needs of Web 2.0 tech startups. When the underyling economics of innovation have shifted so drastically — cheaper high-powered servers, open source LAMP stack, accelerated development tools and techniques (AJAX, Ruby, Php, etc.) — more and more companies can bootstrap from pocket change, and be up and running in less time than it takes to secure capital. As a result, going the VC route is increasingly seen as a brake on this class of tech innovation, not an accelerator, at least in the very earliest stages.
I still think Co-ops are a fantastic way to bet on the upside for software startups, but until I put my lawyer dollars where my blog bits are, it’s all just recreational typing.
Jeff Jarvis: Edgeio and the Distributed World. Good preview of Mike Arrington’s upcoming Edgeio. Useful riffs on classified ads, owning your own listing information, and unemployed middlemen.
Edgeio as it stands is pretty simple: You tag a post on your blog “listing” and Edgeio will spot it and add it to its data base. You add more tags (e.g., “for rent” and “vacation”) and your post/ad will appear in the appropriate categories. Edgeio will allow you to come in and claim your blog to be able to get direct communication from respondents and, eventually, to upgrade your ad via typography and graphics and preference (I hope I got that right). This is just a start but it is a proof of concept of a new world. I’ve been waiting for someone to do this. Arrington has.
Anyone who has thought about online yellow pages or local search will understand that services like this are going to be the future.
Also note Arrington the Brand: He came out of nowhere last year with TechCrunch, reviewing web 2.0 startup companies. Now, with solid street cred he introduces his product and gets immediate coverage from A-list (and C-list!) bloggers. Good moves.