For the past couple of days we’ve been receiving 1000′s of mails saying that someone at Startspin have been sending mails to non-existing people or spam filters. That means someone is sending out a lot of spam faking an address on the startspin.com
So please don’t blame us – but join the fight on spam!
This last week has been so strange. As some of you know I left left Kelkoo/Yahoo last year, as one of many the original Kelkoo management board team. About a week ago a new design was launched (which feels extra strange since the old design was my baby), then almost at the same time news leaked out from Sunnyvale(?) that Yahoo considers selling Kelkoo.
Other blogs have details on the story/ies:
The web is a place for many ideas. Some are good, some are just amazingly amazing. Like the Fuzzberrys. This is a site where you simply book a live web chat with a muppet-like puppet. Useless, some may think. Entertaining, others will undoubtedly say. Certainly it’s the closest most of us will come to a live s.. chat 
If this could be a new way to daily bread and butter for the 100.000′s of struggling actors in the world (or even just some of them) it’s already a great idea. Now you too can start earning with your web cam – only this way you don’t need to freeze. Enjoy!
And oh – btw – my favourite you wonder? Lord Purr Purr – no doubt about that.
How kool is that! The start-up of my former boss Pierre Chappaz – Wikio – just raised a first non-FFF round of financing. Wikio is in a way a competitor to Digg – only they try to take the concept further. Great news Pierre – good luck down the road! Story on TechCrunch and Kelblog (if you read French).
News just in: I presented three of Startspin’s start-up business ideas to Master degree students at the Department for Informatics at the University of Oslo yesterday in a bid to win their help for incubating one or more of the start-ups. These senior students will be doing a practical course in business plan writing and have organised in groups of four where they take different simulated founder roles: CEO, CFO, CTO and CMO.
To my great surprise and joy I found that one of the groups ditched their own idea to work on one of mine! For those of you who just got very curious I’ll give you the name of the project: Startbaby. It will be a Web 2.0 play. It has global potential. Feel free to guess what this start-up will be doing in the comment space below 
Watch this space for news about startbaby.com…
A few years back I headed up the redesign of the Kelkoo you can see today. Inspired by the story of the Nike logo I got Pierre‘s support for announcing a logo competition. it was a terrific success I thought – we got more than 1500 proposals from more than 20 countries, we got a winner forming the basis of the new design and I got a new friend – Hans-Jürgen Sodeikat. Here’s his winning logo:
We kept in touch over the years so when going to Berlin last week it was great to catch up with his current doings. Much to my surprise HaJü chose to go to film school after his senior design education – and he’s now showing his immense talents in yet another area: 3d animation character design.
Check out HaJü’s blog where he’s showing off stuff he’s making daily. Pretty cool stuff! I was lucky to spend an hour with him at the new Haubtbahnhof in Berlin and he showed my all his cool work such as: “The Sacred Stone of Horus“!
My prediction: HaJü will be famous one day – and YouTube could make it happen sooner than we think
Bill Burnham has nicely coined a new term: Persistent Search. Imagine doing a normal search on Google and everytime there is a new (and really relevant) result you would get a mail, new ping in your feed reader or messsenger. Actually the term may be new, but the idea is not – I have been using GoogleAlert for years and it was really cool as long as it was free (wonder if Gideon has found a way to make it free now – AdWords or AdSense should be able to do it for him?). Googlealert does more or less exactly what Bill is looking for – it tells you (via mail) what new results have popped up for your queries – like Google News only looking at the index as a whole, not only news sites.
A company I think may be positioned for a good run for the future race on “persistent search” is Attentio, which today is a B2B company focussing on temporal search and tools for figuring out the online buzz related big brands. With not much tweaking the founders Simon and Per could help the avereage search user do a persistent search across a number of targetted search collections (like news, blogs, web, etc.)
Welcome to Startspin.com!
Searching my mailboxes the other day, I found a mail from a very dear old friend of mine who passed away much too early. I bet not many of you have mails from people who have died lingering in your mailboxes. The Internet is not that old, and most of the users haven’t had time to die yet.
So what happens on-line when you die? Not much I guess. You’ll still be recieving spam. You’ll have a lot of accounts with free web services to which no one probably knows the login – frozen accounts (not with Hotmail, though, since they apparently destroy non-active accounts).
But with all the social networks now bearing proof of users’ existence as on-line personalities – what will be your afterlife on-line? Let’s take Linked-In as example. I assume that if no one tells them you’re dead, you’ll be just a frozen account there – an image of your status and network at the moment you passed away. But what if people in your network starts mailing LinkedIn with news of your death? Two options:
I decided to ask the people at LinkedIn myself. Mail and possible answer will be posted as comment to this post.