So the folks at ad:tech is helping to solve this rather large problem. Innovation Alley is a new section of the ad:tech exhibit floor that is dedicated to interesting new startups in the advertising technology world. There are plenty of conferences that focus exclusively on technology and web startups but they’re attended largely by people within that world. You rarely find customers at these kinds of startup conferences. Industry conferences for different verticals such as advertising, healthcare, transportation, etc., could take ad:tech’s example and devote space to highlight innovative new startups that would normally not have resources to buy exposure to influentials and decision makers from the industries they’re targeting.

The startups I found most compelling at Innovation Alley were ones that addressed the emerging importance of social media in advertising and marketing. I haven’t watched television for a long time. Most of my friends haven’t as well. Not only do we not see mass market television advertising, we don’t trust it anyway. And while we begin many of our purchases online through search engines, we will increasingly get influenced by our social networks of friends, colleagues and relatives to buy things we hadn’t considered before. This is why Google the Goliath is afraid of David Facebook.

Peerset helps advertisers improve their audience targeting. From what I gathered by talking to some of Peerset’s employees, the company combs through social network profiles to construct anonymized data sets of interests and behaviors. The more you reveal about yourself on your profiles and social status updates, the more you will receive relevant advertising. As much as we’d like to believe that we’re individuals with unique tastes and opinions, we’re very much like the rest of our friends. We are more easily put into a group or several groups that share common characteristics than we believe. What I’d like to see is “data profiling” companies like Peerset and probable competitor Rapleaf use their technology to not only help advertisers serve advertising more accurately but to also just produce more interesting content. Sort of advertising by not advertising. Yes, that’s very vague and unhelpful but I think someone will figure out what I mean.

140 Proof delivers advertising exclusively on Twitter. The company helps brands target the right people in the Twitter universe. This is another example of the increasing importance of social networks and the opportunity to customize messages based on personal, yet public, information. 140 Proof claims that great tweets get retweeted. The retweet function, which was invented by users and not Twitter’s management, is one of the most simple, brilliant, and elegant ways to make a message viral. It would be interesting to get real hard data on how often marketing and advertising messages get retweeted versus “regular” tweets.

Brickfish helps brands create campaigns that get consumers to create user-generated content revolving around the brands. Many startups have tried to accomplish this kind of concept. It’s really difficult. As much as we’re becoming more social, we’re also becoming more cynical or skeptical. Consumers are trained to beware of blatant advertising. We might be even more cautious of blatant attempts to get us to help create still more blatant advertising. I’m sure that Brickfish has encountered resistance in some of their campaigns. Perhaps they’ll figure out how to systematically incent customers to sing the praises of brands. If someone can figure this out, I think they have a big hit.

I’m looking forward to the next ad:tech in New York. I hope they will continue to allow startups onto the show floor through the Innovation Alley program. You expect to see the big guns like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google there. There should be room made for pleasant surprises.

We are all early adopters now. Everyone is looking for the new new thing. When someone finds the latest new new thing, technology helps everyone else find out about it and we get to decide if we want to follow along. When done right this process moves lightning fast and blockbuster products surface almost instantaneously. New products cross the chasm faster than they’ve ever crossed before. For remarkable products, the chasm has shrunk.

Despite all this progress, there remains a lack of both art and science in the field of new product launches. We’re simply not moving fast enough or smart enough as we introduce new products because most entrepreneurs and brand managers don’t know how to launch. Billions of dollars go into research and development of new products every year. Billions more are wasted launching new products with misguided attempts to buy attention, interrupt audiences, and reach out to old, mainstream media. Thousands of products die early deaths because of bad launching.

There is a better way.

That’s why I’ve teamed up with Alex Krupp to change the world with LaunchHear. The idea for LaunchHear came out of an experiment called Swagapalooza Alex did during Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program. We were both very lucky to have been given the opportunity to learn from Seth about bootstrapping, shipping, marketing, creating change, overcoming the lizard brain, becoming linchpins, making art, leading tribes, and being remarkable.

Equally exciting, we recently received seed funding from Y Combinator as part of the Winter 2010 batch. Wow! Y Combinator is without a doubt the best startup incubator in the world. No other incubator has been as consistent and prolific at picking great teams, seeding good ideas, and nurturing solid businesses. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston invented the modern incubator model. They layer on value by teaching kick-ass product development and exposing us to mentors like Joshua Schacter, Paul Buchheit, and other successful technology entrepreneurs. The seed funding from Y Combinator is insignificant. What matters most is that the YC team has great taste and an incredible network of people.

So we’ll bring to bear all the goodness we learned from Seth combined with the special Silicon Valley way of building scalable technology businesses we learned at Y Combinator. And we’ll be looking to change the worlds of PR and advertising as applied to new product launches.

To bring about that change, we’ll focus on a few things:

• answer the burning question – what’s new?
• answer the passionate question – what’s interesting?
• make select bloggers, tweeters, and netizens happy by providing interesting things to point to
• help new and remarkable products cross the chasm faster
• level the playing field for companies regardless of launch budgets

There isn’t a lot here about tactics or the specific products or tools we’ll build. I want to focus on the big picture and the fundamental core values.

We’re barbarians at the gate, outsiders with strong opinions about what needs changing in public relations and advertising. We’re optimists. We believe that remarkable products can still make the world a better place. We’re passionate. We’re looking for great people who feel as strongly as we do.

Because of our posture and worldview, we’re going to make a lot of people in the PR and advertising worlds very nervous. That’ll signal we are on the right track. Fortunately, there are also a few linchpins, mavericks and brave souls within the castle walls who see the opportunity we see for drastic change and progress.

If you’re one of these brave souls, you can reach me by email at Allan[@]LaunchHear.com – we’ll have loads of fun!

Beatles tracks are widely pirated on P2P networks. Even Paul McCartney doesn’t object to people downloading Beatles music illegally. The suits at EMI need to learn that having a tiny percentage of something is better than having a lot of nothing.

I don’t get things right as much as I’d like when it comes to the market but my Latticework Linkfest back in late February was spot on:

In times of recession, when unemployment is high, the unemployed go back to school to add marketable skills and increase future earnings power. The leading companies in for-profit education include Strayer Education (STRA), DeVry (DV), ITT Educational Services (ESI), Career Education Corporation (CECO), Capella Education (CPLA), Corinthian Colleges (COCO), and industry giant Apollo Group (APOL). Apollo operates the ubiquitous University of Phoenix campuses. This investment thesis has worked in past recessionary times, but the unique risk this time around is the possibility that the credit crisis will hamper students’ ability to repay or obtain school loans.

The for-profit education companies mentioned have for the most part been immune to the market’s recent collapse. Some have even made significant money for their investors. The risk that students and prospective students being unable to borrow tuition dollars is still very real but has yet to have a material effect. Unlike a sample basket of leading technology bellwethers like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO) eBay (EBAY), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN) and Oracle (ORCL) that destroyed wealth, if you invested in a basket of these education stocks, you’d have a juicy profit or at least preserved most of your wealth.

The leading education companies collectively appreciated approximately 31% since my post published February 25 all the way to yesterday’s closing prices. If an investor had put $100,000 in each of the leading companies in that space, that basket would be worth over $921,000 today. The leading technology companies, as great as their brands and products may be, collectively lost almost 26% of market value. The index that is most apropos as a benchmark in this comparison, in my opinion, would have to be the NASDAQ Composite, which lost 26% of its value as well. An investor putting initial capital of $700,000 in either the NASDAQ Composite or the technology basket would have only $518,000 of value remaining. That’s a whopping difference of approximately $403,000 between the education portfolio vs. the technology portfolio or the NASDAQ index.

Have I been able to profit off this insight? Unfortunately no. I went into cash on June 25th for the majority of my portfolios and my private investment partnerships. In a summer of uncertainty and volatility, I thought it would be a prudent measure to preserve wealth – which has turned out to be a service for my investors and myself (unless of course inflation is higher than what the government is officially reporting). The real estate asset bubble appeared to have made other things expensive as home equity propped up prices in the stock market and other financial markets.

What’s next? Given the stellar performance of for-profit schools, I would take some profits off the table. As much as I admire Warren Buffett, I don’t have the capacity for pain to buy and hold like the old master of value investing. On a macro level, the risks to the education sector in particular and the market in general are still profound. The next shoe to drop will be fund redemptions or withdrawals from mutual funds and hedge funds, which I alluded to in Long Term Capital Mismanagement. If this occurs in a heavy way, the overall market will lose some more value and push us deeper into this bear market. The other shoe that could drop would be a failure of the consumer credit market. Credit card companies will reduce credit lines as consumers fail to meet monthly credit card payments. Consumers no longer have rising home equity to feed their spending habits. Rising unemployment also increases the likelihood of household bankruptcies.

What can we learn from this downturn?

From an investing point of view, there are always countercyclical investments available. Higher in the value chain of countercyclicals are the for-profit education companies. They are far more attractive than the conventional defensive stocks such as food manufacturers like Kraft Foods (KFT).

From a business point of view, I can only speak from the technology startup standpoint as that is where I spend much of my time. It is nice to see that people will be going back to school to learn new skills and improve their future earnings. But as much as I believe that talent can come from anywhere, as a startup entrepreneur I can seldom take the risk of hiring people out of these for-profit vocational schools. I’d rather hire someone without a degree but was passionate enough to teach himself how to write code. Or I’m looking for the genius from Stanford or MIT who dreams in code.

We all know that the rigor of most of these vocational schools like Strayer and University of Phoenix just isn’t up to par with our top national universities or even regional ones like University of Utah, Brigham Young University, University of Colorado, University of Arizona, or University of Nevada Las Vegas. Vocational institutions’ lack of selectivity (anyone can sign up for school with Strayer while prestigious institutions like UC Berkeley reject an overwhelming majority of applicants) and their lack of rigor means a bunch of job candidates with bad habits. Of course there are rare outliers and standouts, but does a startup have the time to evaluate and separate the few good from the mostly mediocre?

A startup’s early days are its most productive and critical. Founding teams employ magic to make something out of nothing. Startups cannot afford to take risks on what most likely will be mediocre talent. Let the large soulless organizations like Ingenix (UNH), Convergys (CVG), and IT departments across the Fortune 500 suck up all the graduates from vocational schools like Strayer, Capella, and DeVry. While the for-profit education companies can make for great investments, their graduates would usually make poor investments.

Has anyone witnessed any suspicious activity on Twitter? I don’t think I have. The only things I’ve seen that even remotely approach clandestine terror are the incessant spammy tweets by self-described “social geeks” and self-appointed “social media gurus” who are essentially parasitic consultants touting some “secret” paradigm-shifting upcoming feature on their hack job “me too” web service, or their thinly veiled attempts to take credit for clients’ products and posture as if they own it with terms like “my startup” or “my product,” or their failed attempts to rally a boycott of Twitter in favor of Identi.ca on the grounds of some open source crusade and then returning to Twitter with their tails tucked between their legs because they don’t understand first mover advantage. These bad guys terrorize the digital airwaves with poor thinking. Would you hire consultants like these? If yes, then you terrorize your own company’s balance sheet, income statement, and chances for success.

Let’s take a look at this recent stock chart from Apple (AAPL) to give us a clue at what might happen to Berkshire stock should Warren Buffett pass away or can no longer run the company. This chart shows a sudden, precipitous decline in the morning hours of October 3, 2008 after a rumor surfaced about Steve Jobs suffering a heart attack. The stock fell 8.2% in a hurry and only recovered after Apple refuted the rumor. Granted, this occurred in the middle of an ongoing global financial meltdown but it nonetheless illustrates a salient point for investors in companies run by larger than life CEOs.

One can argue that a smooth transition would result in a decline far less drastic. Nevertheless, the point isn’t so much about the intensity of the movement but rather the direction of the movement. Perhaps Berkshire investors have already priced in the loss of the great CEO. Maybe the recent plunge in Apple stock price is not just a reaction to the credit crisis but is also a pricing in of the loss of its visionary CEO. A surprise illness or death merely intensifies and shortens the reactionary response, it doesn’t negate the need to discount the inevitable and what would probably be less fitting replacement leadership.

Perhaps no other public company CEOs have become so much an essential part of their company. Apple is the very embodiment of Steve Jobs, the way he sees the world, and his will to impose upon the world his ideals and vision. Jobs’ vision is a poetic and contrarian vision – where technology is beautiful and accommodates the human. Berkshire is as much an embodiment of Warren Buffett. When he took over, the company was a struggling enterprise in a dying American textiles industry. Today, it is a massive investment conglomerate, or rather a wonderful collection, of businesses in myriad industries such as insurance, jewelry, furniture, etc. Warren Buffett’s vision is a playful and contrarian vision – where overly serious people swing from extreme greed to extreme fear and he stands to profit by watching for and catching their mistakes, like playing a yo-yo.

It is hard to argue that these two companies could remain the same without their singular leaders, regardless of how well-laid their succession plans may be. Sure, cultural DNA can be passed down much as genetic DNA travels through generations. But I inevitably see the world differently than my father as will the corporate heirs of Apple and Berkshire deviate from Jobs’ and Buffett’s visions. Shareholders are inherently nervous about the inevitable. The certainty of mortality or frailty leads to the uncertainty of change.

The Web is changing. The current Web is designed to allow computers to retrieve and deliver documents from other computers for the end user to view, read, and interpret. As anyone who has used Google’s (GOOG), Yahoo’s (YHOO) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) search engines can attest, sometimes the retrieval of desired documents and information is accurate and sometimes it is way off base. The Semantic Web, others prefer to call it Web 3.0, has the potential to change the game completely. In the Semantic Web, computers have the ability to understand the meaning of things, content, and documents. In essence, computers can read and interpret information, thereby lightening or shortening one of the steps human users have to perform in order to obtain, discover, and understand information online.

The game is changing but it has just begun.
The transition to Web 3.0 is in its nascent stages. Much work remains before it becomes a widespread reality but the promise is enormous. Some potential breakthroughs include a deeper understanding of user behavior, understanding what matters to them, and a revolutionary improvement in search. A lot of my work centers around health informatics, privacy of data, and multi-dimensional messaging. Much of it would be helped tremendously with the more intelligent approach promised by the Semantic Web.

Everyone is a publisher.
Google made a quantum leap over existing search engines when it launched. As the Web grows and everyone has become a publisher, I’m sure you’ve noticed that the search results have deteriorated in quality. This is because Google’s search engine cannot extrapolate or extract meaning from the web pages it scans and indexes. It can only match the words you type into the query field with the millions of web pages or documents that contain those same words. The next great search engine will be a semantic search engine. This could still be Google, but it will be a completely different Google from what we’re used to now.

Learning more about the Semantic Web.
Jupitermedia Corporation (JUPM) is producing the first ever Web 3.0 Conference & Expo this October in Silicon Valley. Some of the cutting edge companies pioneering advances in attendance include Dapper, Delve Networks, Metaweb Technologies, Powerset (recently bought by Microsoft – maybe Gates and Company get it after all, despite the bad Seinfeld commercials), Hakia, Peer39, and Zemanta. It’s exciting to see significant sums of venture capital being devoted to this opportunity to radically change search and the Web in general. I will be speaking in the Enterprise Information Management session.

Success breeds competition. My previous post also mentioned the formation of the Allied Security Trust, a consortium of large technology companies pooling money together to buy up key intellectual property in order to preempt the threat of patent infringement lawsuits. Members of the trust include Google (GOOG), Verizon Communications (VZ), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Ericsson (ERIC), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and many others. Former Intellectual Ventures executives have formed a competing fund called RPX Rational Patent. RPX’s investors include premier venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Charles River Ventures. The market for intellectual property assets continues to evolve but I believe this new level of competition will introduce efficiencies and is ultimately good.

At Design Engine Lab, we are affected everyday by intellectual property. We are actively creating new intellectual property; we have dozens of patents and patents pending as a result of our product development efforts. We must carefully research prior art and avoid infringing other innovators’ existing patents. We circumvent other innovators’ patents whenever we can can by designing different or better solutions. Our ability to circumvent adds value not just to our own IP portfolio but also to our client’s products. Clients come to us with a certain design or product specification and oftentimes, we are able to bolster their idea with a stronger workaround design or implementation. Since joining Design Engine Lab, I’ve instituted an IP mining strategy. We actively search for interesting patents and improve upon them with stronger implementations. We also approach patent owners to partner with them and create great products.

The rapidly evolving market for intellectual property raises many questions. I’m especially concerned about the Allied Security Trust (a horrible marketing and branding execution). Will a combination of such heft invite antitrust attacks? Certainly, if only large, well-funded technology companies that already dominate their respective industries can join the trust while keeping small innovators off the membership rolls and at an unfair disadvantage, a case for antitrust actions can be made. Will the stalled Patent Reform Act of 2007, which would have curbed the ability of patent trolls to extract large monetary settlements through patent infringement litigation, find fresh support? Does the renewed focus on innovation and intellectual property that permeates the environment represent a new economic opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur? Can someone create a new marketplace or exchange where patents can be bid upon by competing players, much like how stocks are traded today? It sounds like an immense challenge and undertaking – which smells to me like great value and profits.

Umair Haque’s An Open Challenge to Silicon Valley put it in even stronger terms as he labels the current crop of Web 2.0 startups and their incrementalist approach “trivial” and “banal.” I certainly could see the banality of the Web 2.0 echo chamber. Say a company creates a service for users to share picture slideshows online. The next competitor provides a widget for picture slideshows with better transition effects. Then the next entrant will provide the ability to incorporate simple audio effects into slideshows.

Haque’s answer to “what’s next?” is to challenge revolutionaries or entrepreneurs to solve bigger problems. What are some huge problems facing this world? Haque mentions skyrocketing food prices, unstable financial systems, and a worsening energy crisis. To this list I would add terrorism, a deteriorating and increasingly costly healthcare system, global warming, and war.

Pieter van der Heyden – Sloth

The incrementalism Nolan and Haque decried is alive and well. Petty, self-appointed social networking gurus argue about the incremental virtues of Identi.ca over Twitter, Facebook over Myspace (NWS-A), FriendFeed over Twitter, Twitter over Facebook, and countless other variants of this rock-paper-scissors silliness. The other 99.9% of the world’s population couldn’t care less.

At the time I read Nolan’s and Haque’s posts, I was mired at SocialOptimize creating social networking applications for clients. My former partner and I collected exorbitant dollars per hour for our work but I felt as if we drastically overcharged for our services. I came to realize that what we produced were inconsequential products that added little to no value to the economy and society. Even the companies that employed SocialOptimize derived scant value from the apps we delivered. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy games and distractions as much as anyone but these apps constituted neither good games nor good distractions. They were merely companies’ halfhearted and “me too!” attempts at having a presence on social networks. The companies didn’t really even want these apps; they just got caught up in all the Web 2.0 hype.

As an investor, I’ve always been a contrarian but my entrepreneurial endeavors started to look like a vapid run with the herd. Haque’s and Nolan’s posts landed profound psychological kicks to my posterior. So I immediately interrupted my usual programming and have since been obsessed with searching for opportunities to address bigger problems.

My search for meaning has turned out to be fortuitous and delightful. It has taken me many months as I tried to vigorously filter noise from signal, short-term cash grabs from sustainable opportunities. Opportunities never appear scarce; the trick lies in carefully identifying and selecting the ones I can have the most impact on and the most fun with.

So I was ecstatic when I decided to join Design Engine Lab, a leading industrial design firm, as partner and chief strategist. Industrial design is an entirely new world to me and I’ve jumped in with complete enthusiasm. I am steering the firm gradually away from servicing clients and toward developing our own internal products and spin-off companies.

We have designed a new, patented interface technology that we will first apply to the lighting market. Our technology has the potential to curb energy usage drastically wherever it is installed. Some of Haque’s big problems are beyond the scope of my circle of competence, but global warming is one which Design Engine Lab’s greener and cleaner technology can have a very positive impact. Our technology will also affect the delivery and efficacy of healthcare, another big problem, by mitigating the environmental risk factors attendant in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Our technology will be used in hospitals across the United States and that specific segment alone represents a multi-million dollar market.

We’re also forming a joint venture with another company to develop a portable landing zone that will dramatically improve the success rate of emergency extractions of injured people via helicopter. I’ve accompanied helicopter pilots on test flights and have received nothing but the most eager feedback. I’m very excited about this product because it will actually save lives in the real world.

At Design Engine Lab, we conduct serious play looking for ideas that have global implications. Sometimes, that means huge ideas requiring complex execution. But we also engage in what I coined Bite-Sized Innovation®. Small does not have to mean incremental if the result is drastic. We attempt to make small changes that lever up to create huge consequences. Some of our upcoming medical device projects will reflect this Bite-Sized Innovation model. The best part of all this is the intensely joyful feeling of play that permeates all our brainstorming and experimentation sessions.

I don’t want to stray too far from the software world. So I’ve been fortunate to have also gotten involved with Sendside Networks as a consultant helping with research, marketing, business development, and fundraising. Sendside is creating technology that will change the way companies communicate with their customers. It is a highly risky strategy as we are trying to forge a brand new category in the Enterprise 2.0 market. But highly risky strategies are the ones that capture or create enormous value if executed well. In this case, the risk is vastly mitigated by a fantastic executive team and boards of directors and advisers filled with quality individuals. The team is the primary reason I wanted to get involved in the first place.

Without giving away the recipe for the secret sauce, Sendside has the potential to replace a sizable portion of the physical mail stream. In our vision, at its most revolutionary extreme, only junk mail and parcels will flow through the mail stream. Successfully bringing about this vision would make Sendside one of the greenest companies in the world, lightening the global burden on our forest lands forever. I have to give a shout out and thank my friend Jeff Barson, Sendside’s evangelist, for turning me on to this opportunity.

I’ve been lucky to have had the luxury of putting a halt to my daily grind to look for game-changing opportunities. I was especially lucky to have come across the two thought-provoking and ego-shattering pieces by Haque and Nolan. Umair Haque wrote in the end of his post that he’d put his money where his mouth is and advise five organizations trying to solve big problems. Umair, if you’re reading this, please get in touch with me. If not, I’ll be in touch shortly.

When Microsoft (MSFT) bought a small stake in the wildly popular social network, the price paid implied an overall value of $15 billion. The rumored prices at which Facebook insiders are trying to unload some shares carry an implied overall value of as low as $3.75 billion to $5 billion.

It is clear that Facebook currently cannot be worth $15 billion. The Facebook Apps platform that attracted so much attention from independent software developers has lost a lot of momentum. Independent developers who invested a lot of time, money, and energy into creating Facebook Apps have found it increasingly difficult to attract a significant audience. While finding users has been tough, monetizing their creation has proven to be a Herculean task. Special venture funds created to fund Facebook apps have not been able to deploy much of their capital as most Facebook apps are ill-conceived or frivolous with no clear business model. I would return that money to limited partners rather than hope a genius comes along to battle for market share owned by early movers like Slide and RockYou!

Advertising, the main business model of free social networking platforms, continues to disappoint, with click-through rates and conversion rates declining alarmingly. While international growth remains strong, domestic growth is decelerating noticeably. This could be spun as a positive, but I don’t think the youth of other countries have spending power approaching anywhere near that of American youth.

Will this mark the end of the current cycle of funding exuberance on the part of venture capital firms for all things Web 2.0 or social? The pace of venture funding in this sector of the Internet really picked up when Myspace sold for close to $600 million to News Corporation (NWS-A). Since then, millions have been poured into all flavors of social networks and social networking apps. It reminded me of the fin de siècle bubble that burst so painfully for all involved. Below is an essay I wrote for an investment letter published in June 2007 distributed high net worth clients.

Irrational Exuberance 2.0

We are not calling a bust of the current bull market. As much as we admire Barron’s editor Alan Abelson’s wit and literary style, we are cognizant of the ravages that might befall our track record if we were permanent bears. Still, we can’t help but imitate his dour tone of the 1990s when he repeatedly called too early for the bursting of the dot com bubble. Mr. Abelson eventually got it right when we entered the new century and collectively blinked at the stratospheric levels we had taken the market to. Then as now, venture capital funding of cockamamie business ideas served as a reliable indicator of an impending rinsing out of “frothiness.”

As we once again witness new highs in the stock market, it may be wise to examine the shenanigans our friends in the venture capital world are participating in. Are they helping to start companies “built to last” or are they throwing money at silly business ideas “built to be sold?” After a quick survey of recent startup financings, we think a strong sense of déjà vu might visit us.

While yesteryear’s absurd venture deals were justified as the obsolescing of brick and mortar business models by an online nirvana fueled by UPS (UPS) and FedEx (FDX) trucks, today’s venture activity centers around “social networking” and the wisdom and power of crowds, also known as Web 2.0 in geeky circles.

Take NaturallyCurly.com for example. It proclaims itself as the social network for people with curly hair. Purportedly, individuals with curly locks need an online support network for all their hair maintenance difficulties. Don’t forget the most important feature of any social networking community, the ability to make friends with similar interests. We delight at the prospect of spending all our time discussing hair. A technology industry veteran who sold his company to Compaq invested $600,000 into this dandy of a site.

A little less silly but nonetheless vacuous is a website called Flixster. This is the social network for all things cinematic. Users rate movies, join fan clubs celebrating famous thespians, read up on news regarding upcoming films, and make friends.

Websites that allow people to rate movies and chat about their favorite scenes already exist. They just don’t allow people to make friends. This ability to make online friends convinced Lightspeed Ventures, a very reputable venture capital firm, to invest around $2 million into Flixster.

If the dollar amounts involved look nothing like the wasted mega-millions of the late 1990s, we present Geni.com, a website for constructing family trees. The premise revolves around getting relatives to help by emailing them a digital “widget” with which they could plug themselves in the appropriate branch of the family tree. It is the wisdom of crowds, albeit a familial one here, that makes this a very compelling idea indeed. Unfortunately, it occurred to us that great great great grandpa Bob of many years before cannot respond by email from Heaven. That did not prevent Charles River Ventures from injecting $10 million for 10% of the company, effectively valuing the then seven week old company without any revenues at $100 million. We believe the large valuation might have something to do with being able to turn relatives into online friends.

The Big Bang that gave rise to all this Web 2.0 insanity occurred when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the top dog of all social networks, Myspace, for $580 million. Users of Myspace could create their own web pages and browse around the online community to make friends. Google (GOOG) soon followed by buying YouTube for $1.6 billion. YouTube users upload their homemade videos for the whole world to watch. One of the key principles of Web 2.0 is getting the community to contribute user-created content. Did we mention that YouTube users could also make friends with fellow wannabe Spielbergs?

Almost overnight, lemming-like venture capitalists funded dozens of Myspace clones with typically cute techie names like Tagworld, Bebo (TWX), Facebook, Facebox, Multiply, and Gather. Of course, all of these allow users to make friends.

YouTube copycats receiving venture funding include Veotag, Kyte, Mogulus, VideoJug, YeboTV, and Brightcove. Although we haven’t used these sites personally, we’re quite sure you could make friends on all these websites. How many News Corporations and Googles remain to stuff the coffers of venture firms by buying their portfolio companies? It seems as if entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in this space are banking on many more buyouts to come.

It isn’t just the private venture capital world that has fallen to the seduction of easy profits. When flimsy businesses with short operational histories try to tap the capital markets by going public through an initial public offering and find a receptive market, we are treated to such delicious examples as GoFish (GOFHE.OB) , a video sharing website in the spirit of YouTube. Debuting last October on the over-the-counter “bulletin boards”, the fishy company achieved a peak market cap of $147 million. With only $45,580 in revenue and no profits to speak of, investors in GoFish are swimming in a foamy sea of hope and greed.

Our favorite new social network? Stockalicious, a website that allows users to keep track of their portfolios and compare their performances against the market and each other. We wonder if Alan Abelson might jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and become a member of this Internet community. We could sure use a friend or two.