StartUpCrunch

Free Music Player MyPlayList launches beta... check it out it's addictive!

What is simply amazing is that Joe Weiss has done all this without the trappings of venture capital nor the expense of third party design outfits. Unlike the many upstarts that are trying to hustle their way into the arena with VC funding such as Slide OneTrueMedia, SplashCast, RockYou Fliptrack and Photobucket/Adobe.

Sure spending a fortune on offices, programmers, managers and advertising, may win you more retail space on Myspace faster than everyone else, but what happens when you run out of cash? That is the fear haunting these big spenders and their fast-food answer is to sellout quick and let someone else have the hassle of actually making the money.

But such moves are fraught with danger just as PhotoBucket discovered today when News Corp blocked Photobuckets videos out of Myspace mid-track during alleged buyout negotiations and many would argue devaluing Photobucket significantly overnight!

These are the inevitable consequences of get rich quick schemes that rely on uncontrollable foxes for their footing and who are yet to establish sound business models of their own.

These troubles aren't going to be faced anytime soon by the likes of SoundSlide (compiling photo journalism extravaganzas) or Doc-Art-Net (focused on artists and documentary makers) both self funded projects created to fill a specific void in the marketplace and both targeting quality content as opposed to 2 second dribble.

See subtly but even more importantly than market share there is a vast gap in the quality of the content being produced by the little focused players vs the big flashy VC backed players with their massive user base. Having 1 million portfolios showing pictures of utter tripe is not going to win over the hearts and minds of potential advertisers who would want to focus on that demographic if they could access it!

Maybe these quotes from Daniel Sato (a photojournalist and potential user of such devices) summarize the underlying problem that the gold rushers are yet to fully grasp.

"I am not a supporter of showing multimedia presentation after multimedia presentation simply because it is the new hot thing to do and without any real analyzation in the end."

"Please don’t show me another SoundSlides just for the sake of showing multimedia. Teach me how to tell a story."

PayPerPost has been blessed with more negative editorial coverage than any other startup during the 2.0 drama. Yet the attacks continue thick and fast, and mostly from a group of moralistic hypocrites who claim to be defending the integrity of journalism within the blogsphere.

God forbid that Ted Murphy and PayPerPost is offering the world yet another form of potential advertising spam (this time in form of advertorials on blogs). Jason Calacanis takes Ted to task on these issues in his latest entertaining interview. But It's actually good to see Ted defending his business against the allegations that at times border on the point of pious righteousness.

There are some very vocal opponents to this business model that offers mostly mom and pop advertisers a platform where they can connect with mom and pop publishers and exchange mostly 10 bucks. It would be a little less sanctimonious if these attacks were also being vocalized against big media who are more than guilty of flagrantly abusing traditional media for advertising's ends. Yet it is big media that is actually doing much of the attacking.

Edward Bernays the pioneer of "engineered consent" which evolved in the 19th century is probably responsible more than any other person for the collaboration between marketers and media. Using such subtile forms of manipulation that tied hollywood stars to products and even politicians. His escapades can be seen with the following documentary (the last in a series of 4) where you will learn who it was that made smoking in public acceptable for women.

In attacking PPP so ardently many are actually finding they are siding with the accused and rather than damaging PPP they are actually providing a mouth piece for Ted to defend his little castle. It is a rough way to build notoriety, going against the grain in an outright assault of his ethics, but so far it is he who is emerging as the real rockstar of the day.

Yet another new attack came from TechCrunch writer Nik Cubrilovic who on his blog again vocally rants about the latest mistakes that PPP have made and broadcast using their own online reality TV show rockstartup.

And yet again they somehow make up for their failings by actually broadcasting their screw-ups in a candid expose of the challenges they are working to resolve. While it is easy to fault find others 'admitted' mistakes it is often disparaging when they are attacked by people who clearly have little understanding of their own failings. I could mention here that TechCrunch themselves only just discovered how to incorporate a favicon about 2 weeks ago and for a so-called authority on other tech companies one has to question the validity of their own competence!

It's not often you find a new service that is as good as this. DemoGirl as she is infamoulsly becoming known online has been quietly building a database of screencast demos of interesting applications that she finds. She is actually providing 2 stunning services. 1) namely she scourers the internet looking for the latest hot applications 2) she works out what its got that's interesting and then she goes to the trouble of making a screencast / instruction tutorial for the company!

For the applications she finds interesting she is providing the service as a gesture of good will... and thats just nuts.

These screencasts are worth a small fortune and clearly she has been practicing because they are increasingly becoming more professional. I'm pretty sure any CEO would be more than happy to pay for this service and it's actually a serious failing on those companies that have online applications but do not have such a demo to explain the nuts and bolts of their idiosyncrasies.

I'm sure that many of the sites she is featuring and providing this service too free are extreemly greatful for her candid time and effort. In a fairer world she would be compensated handsomely for her efforts. I would only hope that the companies she has featured thus far actually make some gesture of good will in return (I know I certainly would).

If you want to save yourself a load of time figuring out how to use the latest and increasingly complicated online applications, get yourself over to her little paradise sharp and see if she has done a demo for it, and if your very lucky sit back and relax for a little tutorial saving yourself a few hours of fiddling in the dark.

If this is not enough also has a blog where she posts online demos that companies have made themselves. One that I have found to be extremely interesting is a new company called where users can sign up and make a little slide show with audio narration. It's an extremely well thought out service that achieves a very complicated task. Here is their demo.

Content delivery in a hectic world is one of the most relevant issues websites face in the battle for attention over traditional media. Television and radio have one huge advantage over most websites, they constantly deliver fresh content. Websites in contrast are often static sitting there waiting to be discovered. Hoping that when the elusive customer eventually arrives they will get a sale, even then it's most likely that the customer will never come back!

In the last few years the blogging community have discovered a secret! That if you publish fresh content, very often you can get those one time passerby customers coming back for another fix. Albeit bloggers are not in the retail market and often have nothing but advertising space to sell. Nethertheless it is they who are captivating growing audiences that many commercial sites would be especially interested in.

So what's the secret source that bloggers have discovered? Most importantly it was the arrival of email delivery services for newsletters notifying the devotees that new information has just being published.

But getting the apparatus to perform such a miracle depends on some relatively clever new services. A number of companies have emerged with nifty technologies to fulfill these demands namely along with and these are by no means alone. These companies are becoming increasingly familiar with the service that their users require and recently we witnessed one of the biggest milestones being passed. Now not only can we deliver newsletters in HTML but importantly Flash has entered the arena too.

Embedding Flash content into email newsletters takes email delivery into a new dimension which in many cases can actually eliminate the need to visit the site altogether. Is this a good thing? God dam yes, any service that can save the user yet another click, is one that will eventually be adopted in an increasingly hectic world. If you regularly publish quality content you are more likely to find an audience that will tolerate your email newsletter updates and you will soon enjoy a growing audience.

Delivering Flash based videos and presentations is certainly an attractive proposition to the commercial interests of the community. Plus to top this Adobe have launched their latest Flash Player 9, and with that passing it's now possible to display your Flash presentations in 'full screen mode' (albeit you will need a fairly good handle of Actionscript to achieve that effect). So Imagine! It's now possible to deliver an email in full HTML i.e. including images etc. which can also include a Flash presentation / advert that upon the press of the play button could takeover the users entire screen and deliver the most compelling message you can conjure.

So you want this too right? sure you do, but how much will this cost you? That all depends on who or what you know. But the technology does exist and depending upon your content management system you could be in business with your own HTML news letter with just a little time and application.

I am going to assume you do not have anything more than a simple web page where you publish your HTML newsletter. From this page we are going to use a very interesting new service that is also free called . Feedity is a web feed generator for web pages without an existing syndication format like RSS or Atom. There are others in this arena such as PonyFish, Page2RSS, Feed43, FeedYes etc. but for the simplicity of this exercise we are going to stick with Feedity. You simply give Feedity the URL of your newsletter page (which importantly has the CSS embedded in the body of the HTML) and Feedity will intelligently transform that page into a feed that can be used by the email delivery services mentioned above.

Because Feedity makes an intelligent guess at what it believes to be the relevant content (distinguishing from the sidebars, headers and footers that may also be present) it is possible that you may need to make an adjustment to focus attention where you want it. However in practice providing the content page is not too complex I found this to be unnecessary.

Then once you have the Feedity RSS converted feed, you can open an account with Feedburner and enter that feed into their system. Following through their options you will find they provide an email delivery service. Once you have activated this, they will provide you with a snippet of code that you can then incorporate into your own website which allows users the ability to sign up to your email newsletter. From then onwards they will receive full HTML emails every-time you publish new content.

If you also incorporate a stunning Flash based presentation / video into your newsletter you are more than likely going to find your audience start demanding more, more, more instead of angrily requesting that you PLEASE STOP SPAMMING them!

Everyone is competing for the limelight, screaming for attention, looking for a model that has traction, and yet most of the fruit is going sour simply because there is far too much of it. The market is saturated with nearly every conceivable innovation coupled with the desperation of a starving man, so getting the cream to rise in the new marketplace is akin to pushing the cattle uphill to the pumps.

There is a subtle undertone felt by every competitor in this uphill struggle who feels the desperation of this market. All of the entrepreneurs locked into little online cages barking, crying, singing and dancing for attention and at a moments silence threatened with being discarded as scrap.

The internet is a very different market than that in which we have traditionally traded, where the separation between us has vanished, no miles to travail to find a competitor, no space to walk and hardly any effort takes you to the next guy with a pitch.

The market can sense this anxiousness and has become desensitized to the common peddlers and their Mickey mouse offerings who stare now only at the sight of spectacles which in someway they can exploit, like the gathering of dealers at auctions of the dead who look for bargains from redundant factories.

The market has become fickle and you will loose them to the next guy at the first sign of trouble, which might well be in the form of a request for registration, not having the right style, don't even mention money, difficult navigation, or a host of other minor causes that could demand something of the user without giving him his fix first.

As a result the effort to capture an audience has reached epic proportions, with ever greater investments being made in marketing and with ever simpler systems developed for the competitors, to the point now that one can enter the market and publish his own website with as little as 3 clicks of a mouse.

Then as soon as anyone notices the vague whiff of success you will have 10 copycats most of them undercutting themselves to the point of giving whatever you was offering away free, in order to get your slice of the bacon.

We have reached the point now where the winner is actually the one who can give it away the fastest. Forget sound business models, forget making money, forget quality and focus on finding rubbish that you can tout to anyone who will take it off your hands, then auction off segments of your floor space to others who will pay you to offload their own piles of crack.

Then for a few fleeting moments you will have been the champ, the top dog on the stage which will last until your resources are depleted or your competitors have surrounded you, or the market has simply had its fill and cannot stomach a single ounce more.

Unfortunately this is where we have arrived and naturally at these tipping points when the market is selling short the inevitable collapse is just around the corner.

The survival guide is kiss, keep it simple stupid, observe but don't follow, build organic companies from seeds, don't try to muscle your way into markets, and don't be fooled by venture capital from which there is no return to sanity.