Next Net Winners Stand Out at Glitzy “Mash Up”
For longtime tech valleywags, last week’s Business 2.0 “Next Net” mixer was a dose of deja vu. Held down the road from our offices, it was a nostalgic throwback to the flashy rooftop fetes – a la the Industry Standard – in S.F. during the first Web boom. Sipping on vino and cocktails, a few colleagues and I hobnobbed with CEOs, VCs, bloggers and editors, PR pals and other technorati, like next-door neighbors Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. We made merry to honor editors’ picks for Web 2.0 companies that stand out as best bets to strike it rich in 2007.
The Bay Area definitely represented for companies least likely to end up in TechCrunch’s DeadPool. After surviving one dot-com crash and the multiple rounds of agency layoffs in its wake back in the late ’90s, it’s natural to be a bit skeptical of the current enthusiasm. However, there were new business models and trends that caught our attention. Most of them focused on ways to mash up advertising and entertainment into innovative offerings, and new ways to deliver video content through a variety of channels and devices.
One of our clients, Joost, was among the companies honored at the event – as was Spot Runner, a one-stop online shop for low-cost 30-second TV ads that our parent company WPP invested in last year as part of its new digital initiative. A company that I’d personally put money down on is SimulScribe. Last month, I read David Pogue’s unusually enthusiastic N.Y. Times “State of the Art” column on the company’s pioneering service that lets you “read your voicemail.” Through advanced voice recognition software, you can now quickly scan info via online text, search for it and never have to listen to annoyingly slow or long VM’s ever again. How cool!
Like SimulScribe, another Web 2.0 client of ours, Fabrik (profiled in Business 2.0 last November) gets the majority of its software revenues directly through subscriptions, in addition to license fees via large international brands’ CE devices. With last week’s global stock market slide and Greenspan’s speculation about a potential recession ahead, it’s hard not to wonder which of the Next Net 25 will make it for the long haul – especially the ones betting it all on eyeballs and ad revenues.
But in the meantime, it’s surely a fun and exuberant ride!