bubble

Type "green+tech+bubble" into Google search and you get 228,000 results--quite a bit considering the terms "green tech" and "clean tech" are relatively new.

Discussion of an over-investment in energy-related start-ups is hard to avoid when the amount of venture capital dollars--which financed the Internet bubble--going into the field just goes up and up.

All digital ink spilled over the bubble is justified, but for reasons that may seem counter-intuitive, according to Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight, a consulting firm founded by business guru Clayton Christensen.

Anthony contends that many business … Read more

In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.

About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.

AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.

Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.

AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.

Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.

Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.… Read more

In advance of the October 15 debut of Fox's new television business network, media svengali Roger Ailes spoke with The Wall Street Journal about Fox's plans. On other occasions, Ailes has described how the Fox entry will present a more pro-business face to the world than CNBC. That will be a tall order. With the exception of Mark Haynes and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, CNBC's coverage is dominated by suck-ups and sycophants to the rich and powerful.

It's hard to believe Fox can engineer a more business-friendly turn. Then again, these are the same folks who left CNN … Read more

[IMPORTANT WARNING: What follows is satire. I'm NOT being serious. Except for one paragraph at the very end. See if you can spot that one.]

When I first started this blog four months ago, one of the first substantive posts I wrote was called "Bubbles on the brain".

In it, I attempted to use "logic" to explain the reasons we are most likely not in another dot com bubble.

Since that time, talk of a new dot com bubble or Web 2.0 bubble or Internet bubble has only escalated in volume and intensity.

OK.… Read more

This almost falls into the chindogu, or un-useless inventions category, though not quite. The Japanese have once again come up with a weird gimmick that might actually find a sizable market in people who feel compelled to pop Bubble Wrap. You know who you are.

Toymaker Bandai's cute-sounding "Puti Puti" even simulates the sound of the bubbles bursting. It's particularly useful for those with OCD.

Via Japan Today.

(Source: Crave Asia)

You hear it in the halls of the Web 2.0 conferences. You taste it in the sushi at launch events. You feel it when you see the entertainment, bands like Third Eye Blind, hired to play at industry parties. The bubble is back.

And now, The New York Times offers up yet another example of prospective dot-com madness--the rumored return of The Industry Standard.

I worked at The Industry Standard for two years before it sank in the wake of the sector's irrational exuberance in 2001, along with other former rising stars like Flooz.com and Kosmo.com. … Read more

We don't know if kids these days are capable of having fun without a computer or (real) handheld console these days, but this low-tech substitute should provide a bit of amusement--for all of 2 minutes. Yoshi's Island is a faux DS Lite puzzle game that's filled with water and two buttons to control streams of bubbles that move tiny rings inside. The objective is to land the rings into the right spots using your amazing bubble navigation skills. Good luck selling this to Junior.

(Source: Crave Asia)

Up until this afternoon I had never heard of the expression "hypervideo," although I was quite familiar with the concept having used it in video services like Viddler, and enhanced podcasts in Windows Media Player. The idea is simple--take hyperlinks and textual information, and add it to various times or positions on a video. The result is that your viewers can have added contextual information about whatever they're watching, at the moment it happens.

The hard part is the execution, and making things user-friendly. A service called Asterpix has taken a stab at it with a hypervideo … Read more

With the piles of dish scrubbers on the market, finding the right one was a somewhat dirty operation. There were so many things to consider: regular or mini sized, mesh or sponge, soap squirter or standard, Walgreen's or OXO. And though I've been known to enjoy doing the dishes, my main goal was to find a scrubber that expedited the process. That is until I met the Bubble Scrubber.

Incorporated into this souped-up scrubber is a large bubble wand that sends a combination of Dawn and microbial remnants of last night's spaghetti into the air. It isn'… Read more