I got back from the Future of Web Apps conference at the beginning of the week and I’ve already picked my next conference to attend. I’ve decided to attend PodCamp in New York City. I’m pretty excited to network with the other bloggers and podcasters as well as meet members of the social media club in New York City. I think PodCamp will be a good networking experience. At this rate I’ll be working the conference circuit as a speaker in the near future. Ha. Anyways, there will be some great presentations at the conference. Also, for better or for worse, any of the attendees can register to speak. So what is PodCamp? According to the PodCamp site:

PodCamp NYC is a FREE unconference dedicated to podcasting, blogging and other new/social media—hosted and co-organized by the prestigious New School. The objective is to allow you to:

• Learn about podcasting & social media
• Share your ideas about podcasting and social media by conducting your own session
• Form new relationships and build the community
• Have fun!

Head on over to the PodCamp NYC Website to learn more about the conference.

After today’s huge plunge, I think now might not be a bad time to enter the market, especially considering much of the drop was due to a computer glitch. While there has been a series of down days (suggesting that the downward movement may have momentum), the significant drop to day is just a correction. Following the massive stock market drop after September 11, there was a quick buyback. As a result the stock market returned to pre-9/11 levels within a short amount of time. I think this will happen again, even with the talk of a possible recession toward the end of the year.
Read more about the market drop

I have heard a lot around the blogosphere about how blogging is beginning to peak. I partially agree in that the masses have slowed their pace in creating one-time blogs in which they post only a few posts and quit. On the other hand I have spoken with a lot of people my age and have tried to persuade them to blog. Many of them have taken my advice and continue to blog on a regular basis. There will be an increasing number of blogs created as the MySpace and Facebook generations begin to enter the professional world. Blogs are one of the best ways to promote yourself (if not the best). Becoming a source of information in your industry is key in becoming an industry leader. While the few people that I interact with will have a limited effect on the entire blogosphere, I’m sure there are plenty of other people like me that heavily promote blogging. So while we will not see the massive growth in blogging that we have been experiencing in the past couple years, there will be an increase in blogging by young professionals.

Since the launch of Panama, the web and business world have been buzzing about Yahoo. Much of the discussion revolves around whether or not Yahoo will be able to stage a turnaround. When I attended the Future of Web Apps conference last week, Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo spoke a lot about “redemption”. I’m not quite sure if Yahoo will successfully redeem itself, but they are definitely trying.

I have been reading a lot about what steps Yahoo could take to stage a turnaround. Steve Poland at Techcrunch thinks that MyBlogLog could play a vital role in Yahoo becoming a dominant player in the text ad world. Eric Jackson proposed a 9 step plan to turnaround Yahoo. At the head of his list is firing Terry Semel for a number of missteps over the past few years including failing to buy Google in 2002.

While it is easy to condemn Yahoo for their poor business performance in comparison to Google, the company is in the underdog position which could prove to be beneficial. BusinessWeek.com seems to think that the launch of Panama is a great first step in the turnaround of Yahoo. Additionally, early comscore statistics regarding Panama show the system to be off to a really strong start. I guess will just have to wait to see what the future holds for Yahoo.

Both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have published articles discussing the impact of a proposed merger between XM and Sirius Satellite Radio that was announced last week. I posted about a possible merger back in November but the official announcement came last week. The New York Times has reported that the deal would end up with Sirius paying a premium to XM Satellite Radio shareholders. Why would Sirius pay a premium when in most mergers of equals there is rarely a premium paid? Well as the New York Time explains:

Things become clearer, though, when you look beyond the numbers and consider the psychology behind the deal. Because of the possibility that Washington could block the transaction, Mr. Karmazin said that nobody wants to look like the loser if things go bad. “You want to make sure if it doesn’t happen, no harm, no foul,” he said.

So although a merger has been announced, there is going to be some major regulatory hurdles for both companies. Since XM and Sirius are the only competitors in the satellite radio industry it will be extremely difficult for the deal to get approved considering the merger will create a monopoly. The only chance for approval is based on the fact that competitors to satellite have begun to and will continue to emerge. Additionally, Mel Karmazin believes that the deal “can be rushed through the regulatory maze while the Bush administration is still in power.” It will be interesting to see how this ends.

According to DealBreaker.com, Last.fm might be sold to Viacom. If so, this would be some huge news. I saw Last.fm present at the Future of Web Apps and they definitely were pitching themselves as a valuable service to record labels. Apparently, the attention data that they are storing in regards to user’s music listening habits is worth $450 million. To be honest, I’m not quite sure that $450 million would be enough, considering that MySpace sold for more than $550 million if my memory serves me correctly. Either way, Last.fm is a prime takeover target for any large record label. If the rumor is wrong this time, I’m sure that we will see it happen sometime soon.

Yesterday, Jeremy “ShoeMoney” was banned from MyBlogLog for posting articles about how to hack MyBlogLog. One of his first articles about hacking MyBlogLog was written three weeks ago, and the problems were not fixed. I don’t know about my fellow bloggers that are using the system, but this is unacceptable. I love using MyBlogLog and think that it is a great system, but I don’t enjoy that people can spoof other people’s identities and view my site as someone else. While I won’t go as far as Andy Beal who has decided to boycott MyBlogLog, I do hope that they fix the problem. By simply verifying the session id cookie they could fix the problem. While exploring the MyBlogLog cookies in my browser I noticed the mbl_sid cookie which is prefaced with my user id seems to be present. Perhaps they have since fixed the problem that ShoeMoney discussed a couple days ago, but banning him for making the issue public is unnecessary. They have essentially banned one of their most avid users. Bad idea guys.

Yesterday, while at the Future of Web Apps conference, I attended a seminar discussing differences between the European start-up culture and the U.S. start-up culture. Aside from the occasional mud-slinging by Mike Arrington who was in his words “being controversial”, there was one thing that has had me thinking. Many of the questions that people posed to the panelists revolved around the concept of “What can you do for me?” As an entrepreneur, you need to realize that in the beginning you are pretty much on your own. Outside of your support group (which is necessary to your success), don’t expect a lot of supportive feedback. I heard one person essentially ask what people in the U.K. can do to make people more “accepting” of failure. Are you kidding me? If people in Europe believe that Americans are not afraid of failure then they must be drinking the wrong Kool-Aid. Conversely I don’t think that this individual was an accurate portrayal of the majority. One individual (who is a native U.K. citizen) that I sat next to later that day told me that they understood the concept that people may be likely to blame cultural aspects on the lack of entrepreneurial spirit in Europe, but they need to just “get over it”. That’s the truth.

As an entrepreneur you need to stare failure in the face and just get on with the work that needs to be done. Accepting failure is one of the most important aspects of being an entrepreneur. Failure is the risk you take, but success is sweet. Most people are not going to be extremely supportive of your venture and that is a fact of life. If you are lucky though, you can build a nice support group of people that let you know that it’s worth the effort. If you haven’t been told by anyone that it’s worth the effort, than let me be the first to do so. Entrepreneurship is a challenge, and you will face people that tell you that “it can’t be done”, but that is the best part about it, the challenge. Hold tight to the vision of success and ingrain it into your mind. That is all that you have. Even if you fail once, twice, or more, you haven’t failed until you’ve quit trying.

The blogosphere is buzzing about the new Google Apps that launched today. Google Apps is the official release of the prior Google Apps for Your Domain which was in beta. The new Google Apps will offer organizations a way to manage all of their employee’s mail, calendar, documents, and spreadsheets. The Google Apps are being offered at a rate of $50 per user per year which is a significant discount.

While Forbes seems to be hyping this as a direct target at Microsoft, I’m not quite sure how much of an impact they will actually have. While I would definitely be willing to substitute this for exchange, larger organizations would not be as likely to do so since they would consider this to be a security risk. I view Google Apps as more of a competitor to existing web based office solutions. One such example is ContactOffice.com (who was also a speaker at the Future of Web Apps conference), who currently has over 300,000 paying subscribers. Graham Davies of CixOffice.com told me that they are also in direct competition with Google Apps and are concerned about the impact. I think in contrast to Forbes who believes that Google is taking on Microsoft, Google is actually taking on the smaller web/virtual office businesses.

Is this new service the premium Gmail service that I wrote about a couple weeks ago? While Google Apps is packaged as an all-in-one solution (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Page Creator), the main thing that you are paying for is a large 10 GB email account in addition to the service being hosted under your domain. I should have signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain when it was free! Currently Google is offering the service for free through April 30th, so you can give it a test run.

I’ve been M.I.A. for the past few days since I was attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London. I will cover more about the conference in my coming entries but the really exciting news coming out of the conference is that both Digg and Netvibes are going to start offering OpenID support. It seems as though there was big push for the companies at the event to promise to add OpenID support. I think Michael Arrington might have had a little something to do with the OpenID announcement, but that’s another story. Regardless, it’s pretty exciting to see companies hopping on the OpenID bandwagon. I think that my assertion that 2007 will be the year of OpenID is rapidly coming true.

Yesterday, my friend Jesse posted about an interesting BusinessWeek.com article. The article discusses the unannounced Brickhouse program at Yahoo that is “born out of the notion that Yahoo’s employees come up with ideas for new ventures, but they haven’t had an effective way to execute them.” This sounds fairly similar to Google’s 30-percent time in which employees are encourage to work on side projects that can then be released under the Google name.

At the beginning of December I wrote about how Yahoo and Google should each create their own venture capital companies. A couple days later I mentioned that it would be wrong to do so because that would mean the companies don’t have faith in their internal R&D departments. I guess the alternative is Brickhouse. It sounds like Brickhouse will function like an internal venture capital program. Taken to an extreme, Yahoo could tell programmers “Have an idea? Come work for us and we’ll fund it.” That would be nice! I doubt that the developers will be spending 100% of their time on new projects. If they are, hire me Yahoo!

In the past few weeks there has been a bunch of steps take toward making OpenID the identity standard on the web. At the end of January I questioned whether OpenID is going mainstream with the addition of OpenID to Firefox 3.0. A week later, I wrote about Kim Cameron’s announcement of OpenID becoming interoperable with Windows CardSpace. Just yesterday, Johannes Ernst said that AOL is building in OpenID to their infrastructure. It’s beginning to look like this may just be the year of OpenID. Will everyone be using one login for all their memberships in the next year? At this rate, I would bet on the masses beginning to embrace OpenID by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see what happens.