Aggregation and Diffusion

You can feel it. Nearly taste it. It’s almost feels like 1994 again.

Every hockey stick needs some buzz words: Web 2.0, the Long Tail, Collaboration, AJAX, RSS, Consumer Generated Media…ad nauseam.

News Corp = hungry. After the $580m breakfast of Intermix (incl. MySpace) back in July, we aren’t even to lunch yet and IGN becomes the next snack for a cool $650m. Gotta love indy musicians and gamers.

World of Warcraft (WoW) just busted through 4m users world-wide. That’s about $700m/year in revenue. Not bad. I don’t think Diller can sit on his hands with IACI much longer and just watch all of this…what do you think?

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (aka AJAX) is the magic behind some cool UI’s out there like Google Maps and Basecamp. This isn’t new, but it seems we’ve all just realized the web experience is so much more fun if it feels like a resident program. Microsoft will release their SDK for start.com later this month.

…and where’s the sizzle without the steak?

Super cool del.icio.us, with its collaborative bookmarking, has a new entrant in the space seems. Yahoo! is transitioning quickly after the Flickr purchase with MyWeb2. With their broad and deep user base, they will be quite formidable.

Apple seems to be able to do no wrong this year. Jobs claimed in the Apple special event earlier this week that as far as they can measure, iTunes is the second largest store (10m accounts) next to Amazon on the Internet. The Motorola/Cingular iTunes phone. And, well, now there’s Nano too. 1000 songs. Impossible small.

VOIP is setting up to be our “Browser wars” in the ’00′s.

“Paradigm shift” play, Skype is being courted by eBay in the $2b – $3b range. This after the announcement by Google of their intentions to raise another $4b and the release of Google Talk. Of course, shortly thereafter, Vonage announced their desire to raise $600m in an IPO. Will telcos just end up leasing pipe?

Stayed tuned. Maybe next time I’ll do this as a podcast or Vlog!

Campanelli loop: 1:10:00

Disclaimer: I have stock in all companies listed in this post that are publically traded, save Google.

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