Web 2.0 Movers and Shakers (2)

A friend of mine mentioned a list of companies after reading my previous post (Web 2.0 Movers and Shakers):

1. 1-800-FREE-411 (http://www.jinglenetworks.com/): raised $400K A round + $26M B Round, located in CA. Interesting concept yet quite simple – My qestions are: can anybody explain why not TellMe Networks, 1-800-411-Metro, etc doing this? Why wouldn't Verizon offer something like this? Lastly, how many times a consumer would call 411 to look for infomation? (The real question here is market data: is 411 an $8B market as the company claimed?).  —Good questions to ask Chip Hazard;

2. MyPickList and GiftTagging: – social commerce? There are some elements of neat ideas here, but both need a lot of work to get to something really interesting. MyPickList's business model is cool;

3. Kaboodle (http://www.kaboodle.com) – web bookmarking combined with “social publishing/sharing”. Neat, but needs a lot of work to get somewhere.  There is no clear definition of what to do, what this can be used for, and so on.  Being generic is good, but it is hard to get started. Remember the argument between Platform and Application choices in the software business? It is hard to build a platform company, very hard. But once you built it, you can enjoy it for a long time (lFor example, nobody in his right mind would choose 4GL today, but Progress does $400M per year based on a 4GL platform – ). It is always dificult to pick being a platform company or application company.

4. listal (http://www.listal.com) – very well done. Listal is much more focused than Kaboodle with a clear “problem” domain:

• Maintain a list of things you want to buy
• Let people know about the things you own.
• Invite friends to join and see what they have been reviewing and have been watching/reading/playing recently.
• Track items you have loaded to friends
• View statistics about your collection
• View recommendations of other things you should buy
• Organise your collection with tags and ratings
• Read and write reviews
• Keep track of books you haven't read yet or movies you haven't watched.

More to come…Drop me a line if you see interesting web 2.0 offerings.