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business2blog: (B2Day) The Business 2.0 Blog

My Next Job, at TechCrunchSeptember 20 2007

So I haven't said much about the demise of Business 2.0 or what I will be doing in the future (despite getting asked about it at least 50 times a day).  I will leave the carcass-picking to others.  But I will also be leaving the magazine business to others.  As of next week, I will become co-editor of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington.

It's tough to leave a place like Time Inc. after 14 years.  I often felt I had one of the best jobs in journalism—finding and writing about the smartest people on the planet.  But over the pa

Liveblogging TechCrunch 40: Day 2September 18 2007

Here are some highlights from Day 2 of TechCrunch 40 (in reverse-order of appearance):

Google Docs Presentations: Google is demoing its online presentation software that it just added to Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.  Now, Google has finally completed its trifecta, and has a complete Webtop suite to compete with Office.  You can't do everything you can do with PowerPoint, but the value to these types of Web apps is the collaborative aspects. You can invite other people to help you create the slide show and all of you can work on it at the same time.  In response to a question about whether it is important to have offline versions of Google Docs (using Google Gears), the Google employee presenting says, "Yeah."  So maybe we'll get that in the future.

Breaking: Facebook's Zuckerberg Announces FB FundSeptember 18 2007

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just announced on stage at the TechCrunch 40 conference that he is creating a $10 million fund, to be called the FB Fund, to give $25,000 to $250,000 grants to software developers creating applications on Facebook.  He is doing this with Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures.  These will be no-strings-attached grants.  Founders and Accel won't get a stake in the companies, but they will get first rights of refusal to invest later if any of the startups raise a more sizable venture round.

The money will be doled out by an advisory board to consist of Thiel, Breyer, Zuckerberg, Josh Koppelman, and Reid Hoffman.  Says Zuckerberg:

Any developer can submit their app. If we think the project is good we will give a grant.

Zuckerberg clearly wants to create as many incentives as he can for developers to create cool apps on Facebook, as do Thiel and Breyer (who are investors in Facebook).

Yahoo Buys Zimbra for $350 MillionSeptember 17 2007

Yahoo has agreed to buy Zimbra, a startup that offers Web-based corporate e-mail (and a Next Net 25 company from 2006).  The price is a hefty $350 million—one of the largest for a Web 2.0 startup to date.  Yahoo is right to build up its portfolio of Web-based apps, but Zimbra is an enterprise app.  Yahoo (YHOO) is a consumer company.  So this could end up being a stretch for them (or its entry into a whole new market).

Update: A senior Yahoo executive just told me that the acquisition was more for Zimbra's technology than an attempt to create a wedge into the nascent enterprise Webtop market.  That makes more sense.  So expect to see some of Zimbra's gee-whiz Webtop features appear in Yahoo's consumer e-mail, contact, and calendering apps down the road.

(See my earlier coverage fo Zimbra here, here

Liveblogging TechCrunch 40September 17 2007

I'm at the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco today and will be liveblogging the event.  Forty startups are launching new Websites/products. 

Here are the standouts (in the reverse-order that they are giving their demos on-stage):

Truetap: Mobile social networking.  Not yet in the U.S.  Nice app, but seems to be coming late to the game.

Ceedo:  The company is introducing Ceedo Mobile, which lets you store photos, files, and applications on the flash memory of your phone.  When you connect to any PC, it recognizes the phone as a USB storage device.  But you can launch your own files and applications.  For example, you can launch your Web browser with your settings and bookmarks from somebody else's PC.  Why carry around a laptop, when you can just carry around your phone?  That's the idea.  Too bad most phones don't have sufficient memory to make this prac