What am I Missy? Episode 2

Disappearing startups, Al Gore's speech, and a thought from Zuckerberg

Here's a look at top stories VatorNews covered last week.

Has anyone seen 2004? How about 2005? As far as startups go, those years seem to have vanished. A prominent angel investor told us this week that valuations for the youngest startups have been slashed in half, back to where they were five years ago.

And, we thought it was just the prices of homes and stocks that were going down.

(See Web 2.0 startup valuations slashed to 2003 levels.)

It's now official. Silicon Valley luminaries are unanimous in saying that the way to fix the U.S. Economy is to completely rebuild the country's power industry. In other words, to make enough green to go around, we need to spend more green on green technology. Harnessing the desert sun, the mountain, wind, and the geothermal power, and tying it all together with a new electric grid is the cure for what ails us, former VP Al Gore told the Web 2.0 conference.

Let's just hope it will create enough jobs to employ all those power mortgage loan officers.

(See Gore says building new grid kills two birds with one stone)

Facebook's CEO has better things to do than worry about his company's valuation or even its profits. Mark Zuckerberg says he feels no pressure to measure up the billion valuation that the company got from its Microsoft investment a year ago. He also said he is not worried about turning a profit. "What counts is growth," the 24-yr-old CEO said. While the company's pageviews have been climbing fast, we can't help but think that this sounds a bit like an echo from the dot com era, when hundreds of companies disappeared after saying that profits didn't matter.

Will the poster child of Web 2.0 find a way to make a profit?

We'll check back after a few more million sheep get tossed.

(See Zuckerberg on revenue, Google and FB Connect.)