David Beisel has a succinct post on seven trends he has identified as start-up opportunities.

1. The digitalization of transportation experience.
2. Internet’s facilitation of green lifestyle.
3. Influence and word-of-mouth marketing facilitated by online social software.
4. Fundamental shift demographics of internet usage.
5. Mobile consumption of information.
6. Wide proliferation of video.
7. Digital information becoming increasingly personalized with greater user control and choice.

While most of these trends can be identified as being universal with the internet, some are more relevant to the entrepreneur outside the U.S.  Trend number 5, mobile consumption of information is where the international entrepreneur is actually ahead of her American counterpart, and trend #2 is probably not going to be so relevant outside the U.S. for a while.

However, the rest of the list is very important, relevant and worth some thinking by the international entrepreneur.  And among those, I think the most critical is the shift in demographics.  We are now feeling that same shift very emphatically in Turkey, and I bet that it will form the basis for the next generation successful internet businesses here.

I have been emphasizing my belief that Facebook is distinct from other social networking services in that its DNA is that of a technology company.  In contrast, MySpace has always been a media company (now owned by a larger media company).

Facebook’s acquisition of Parakey confirms this belief.

WSJ reports (via Paul) that the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com domains just got sold to Answers.com for $100m.

The number is large enough to assure me that much analysis has gotten into it and that this is  not purely speculative.  It also makes me suspect that not enough players are doing that and it leaves the internet traffic market less efficient than it should be.

I wonder if securitization of domain name sets could be in the future.

MySpace passed the 100 million users mark almost a year ago.  Facebook has about 25 million users.

MySpace is ranked sixth in highest traffic websites.  Facebook is the 11th.

MySpace has had a homerun exit.  Facebook remains private and independent.

I would not trade Facebook for two MySpaces.

The reason?  They are a technology company making an infrastructure move.  MySpace is a media company.

And Facebook is kicking MySpace’s ass.

FT reports that MySpace will follow Facebook’s lead in developing sophisticated APIs and let developers launch apps on MySpace.

MySpace is likely to change its technology strategy to allow other
online companies to “plug” their web services directly into its social
networking site…
…
The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival
Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network
to outside developers.

There are now over 65 million apps activated on Facebook; about 2.5 per user.  My bet is that MySpace’s comparable platform will not be nearly as effective.  Because MySpace is a media company.

I’ll join the choir:  Marc Andreessen’s been blogging at an incredible pace and seems to knock out one stellar post after the other.  His newest is the first part of a series on his thoughts about startups.

It’s well worth a read for anyone running or thinking about starting a technology venture.

Marc Andreessen has started blogging and out comes a series of great posts, especially this one about how there’s no such thing as web 2.0.  He calls it a trend:

What happens when startups start getting referred to as "Web 2.0
startups" — or for that matter, "B2B startups" or "mobile startups" or
"pen computing startups" — or as being in the Web 2.0/B2B/mobile/pen
computing "space" — is that trends are getting mistaken for markets
and products.

You can’t build a company based on a trend.

In the early 1990s, the telcos were racing each other in building their proprietary networks.  Metcalfe’s Law and the power of networks was starting to be understood, and the quest to create the dominant network was on, with the "networks2 intelligence" positioned as the key differentiator.  In France, we saw a version of this with the Minitel.

Then came the stupidest network of all: the Internet.  All it knew was to push IP packets around.  There was no intelligence built in to the network.  The intelligence resided on the edge.

In Turkey last week, we saw the launch of two proprietary social networks by two of the three GSM operators.  Turkcell created Turkcell-im Benim (translates to My Own Turkcell), and Avea came up with Patlican (a play on words, meaning both "eggplant", and "you will explode").

Turkey already enjoys a healthy set of social networking platform, ranging from Yonja (which started out as a Friendster look-alike) to Mondus (which we launched as a social utility/platform 3 months ago.)  Here comes a telco powered platform. And by the way, you can really interact only with other customers of that GSM network.  Quite a uniting characterstic, is it not?  I really feel like I have a lot in common with other Avea customers.

The telcos should treat the independent social platforms as the stupid network, and try to bring their intelligence layer on top of those, instead of trying to build their intelligent networks.