Russ's comments

Reena, Good interview, interesting look inside how a big VC looks at deals. I do think its interesting that he stated they are looking at deals that could become billion dollar sized companies, that sure limits the deal flow. I really appreciated his comments on the team aspect, and how closely they look at how the team works together.
on How to get funded (or not!): Tim Draper chats with IvyBrain

Love the beatbox! Love the concept, its going to need to develop alot of user love to be valuable. If they can leverage a location specific social network play in here they can be huge (see <a target='_blank' href=' http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/09/i-saw-the-future-of-social-networking-the-other-day/) '>["http://www.tech...</a>
on Buzzd

Holi-Moli! I don't want to be a nay-sayer out of the box, because the truth is I can see some real value potentially here. Moli is competing with other Soc-Nets in a unique way - by enabling users to "control" their "privacy". Not a bad idea, but really all they do is add an additional layer to what most others do, so I think they are potentially going to miss the opportunity. I think that privacy is not the problem, its the message. I think they are correct that individuals and companies have different messages to different markets, and having one web space that enables me to "control" those messages has value. So the real question is can they connect their marketing message to a large enough market for it to be worthwhile. As a person or a biz, choosing a Soc Net with so few users compared to Myspace, Facebook, Hi 5, Ning... seems like a risky choice. As an individual everyone I know is on this or that network and I want to make it easy to be with them. As a business I want to be where the market is. I think this one is likely DOA. Sori Moli.
on MOLI DEMO 08

Look, Friend Feed is a really great service and poised to really take advantage of the market, but that video sucks! They better have a good PR firm, or start using their user base to create a pitch video. Hey thats a great idea! FF you should reach out to your very talented user base to build a "what is friend feed" video and give away a free iPod!
on FriendFeed

Very Cool, as long as they continue to aggregate great content they have a serious play in the market. It would be interesting if they could develop an OpenSocial/Facebook model where individuals could post content they felt was interesting and generate revenues from their MySpace pages.......
on Mochila

Anytime you can leverage a large distribution group by offering a free tool and generate ad revenues you have a great opportunity. That said, I am not sure that this tool will be widely adopted by the blog community because the nature of most blogs is not to read the most viewed posts, but to read the most current. So while its a nice secondary feature, I don't see why any of the blog services couldn't add it in very short order as a new feature. Further I see a real problem in spoofing the numbers rather easily if I as a company wanted to ensure my story remained near the top viewed of a blog.......
on Spotplex

If you havn't tried Flock, you need to. If nothing else its a unique web experience, I think its still early in the mix and will likely get purchased by one of the 3 (Yahoo, MSFT, Google) probably Google if Microsoft buys Yahoo. If you spend any serious time online I recommend you try it!
on Flock

KickApps has a good idea here, delivering a significant value add to 2nd and 3rd tier websites. I've played around with the functionality and it looks pretty easy to leverage. I'm not sure how Alex can back up the concept of significantly increasing traffic to a KickApps enabled site - that assumes that either more people will come to the enhanced site or people will come more often - or both. I get the latter, but not sure what increase a site would have from its existing users - 1.5 X? I'd love to see some case studies or metrics to back this "Selling Point" up. That said, if you want to add some cool features to your site for some screen real estate and a little dev time, this is a great service. I wonder if it scales?
on KickApps

This will not work, can't scale. They are too late to the game, Google could add this in a week if its a good feature, and there are already companies like Stumbleupon.com and the like that do this very well already without you changing your search habits. The sad truth is that if it became a viable model it would be "black-hatted" by marketers voting up their clients sites which would outdo any user base.
on Recommendations- Analysis- Behavioral Advetising

Smart way to monetize VOIP. Big hurdles are peoples willingness to get on camera, live can be more than a little unsettling for some. Its also an easy service to trump the biz model, people ill just need to put up a sign with a number IM address to avoind paying the buck......
on WooMe

Its a viable market and they appear to have a lot of content. The question is if they can scale content to leverage the local markets. It would be cool if they would use the rivalry aspect as a means to grow usage by getting students to vote and comment on who will win the game that week and "Crush" the competition. College students have access to and are very tech savvy so they are a perfect market to build a combination user generated slash developed content combination with. Smart idea, I don't know why they are getting no love on this thing. How does a "crowd sourced" search engine get more votes? Is anyone paying attention to the number of search engines out there? Anyway good luck Crush!
on CrushTV

Yeah the music was bad, lighting too. They appear to have some good partners but none will carry the load for them. Why do they think they should push their own DRM? DO we really need yet another flawed DRM model? In the end this will be a good market but they failed to show why they can be a part of it, who's running the show? What's the user support model so far? Blah Blah Blah
on Zipidee