On the heels of Kerim Baran’s presentation at the April meeting of Istanbul NEG, where he announced the launch of 7inci, a DailyCandy-like web service, a new New York Magazine article is stoking the fire on the rumors of DailyCandy‘s potential sale.  The new price tag?  $200 million.

It’s nearly impossible to apply the usual valuation formulas to DailyCandy. According to the Wall Street Journal,
the company projects revenue of “somewhere less than $20 million” this
year. Most successful businesses go on sale valued at least ten times
their yearly revenue, so by this standard, DailyCandy should cost $200
million or more.

I find it amusing that old media sometimes gets tricked into blowing the hot air into some of these new media balloons.  The previous price set for DailyCandy was $100 million, and that time it was the WSJ! 🙂  Bob Pittman’s doing a good job of getting them to bid up his auction (He’d paid $3.5m for DailyCandy in 2003).

Rafat thinks that these valuations are little more than amusing reading.  I get ready to agree with him, but then, have to stop and think about the value of attention, and remind myself on the rumored $2b price tag thrown around for The Facebook a few weeks ago.

We’ll get one answer if and when DailyCandy gets sold.

I am spending some time on product development, a favorite activity of mine, these days.  I came across this post on Signal vs. Noise.  I could not agree more.

Last Thursday Google announced its Q1 numbers that blew the estimates away.  I have been meaning to write about how incredible these numbers are, but Fred Wilson was quicker:

Quarterly revenues – $2.25bn, up 79% year over year
Quarterly EBITDA – $1bn – up 86% year over year

Now let’s just take a second to comprehend those numbers.

We are witnessing a business that is approaching $10bn in annualized revenues growing at 80% year over year.

And we are looking at a business with operating margins of almost 50%.

Now, having lived through the go-go 90’s with my 401K in picked-tech (i.e., very few tech stocks), and having learned my lesson, I am usually the sceptic who says, "everytime we are promised a ‘paradigm shift’ and that this time ‘it’s different’, we see asset prices reverting to mean." (I am reading "American Sucker" by David Denby right now, which serves as a nice reminder.)

However, I can not help but get excited about what an amazing company Google seems to be building.  If I were old media, I would be worried.

The Mercury News’s Silicon Beat blog has a post highlighting Baris’s Web2.0 List, with comments on the huge size of the list and how even a list of this size can not keep up with the Web2.0 pace.

A nice quote is:

David Hornick, venture capitalist over at August Capital, sees the list and wakes up to the fact that four of his companies now have 33 competitors, and that’s only counting ones on the list. "That is mind blowing," he remarks.

Thanks, Tahir, for the link.

Timely for today’s Istanbul NEG April Meeting, Paul Graham has a great post about ideas being copied:

Even when competitors realize your idea is good, (a) it will take them a long time to implement and (b) they’ll probably screw up critical things.

And finally, working on your ideas will lead you on to new ideas. So you’ll be a moving target; by the time competitors copy what you’re doing now, you’ll be doing more.

…

Worry most about how to make something people want. If you’re building anything good enough to copy, you’re way ahead.

I’d written about timeshifting and placeshifting in media before. TiVo had blasted the time restrictions in media consumption, although, I don’t think it has won the game, yet.  DVR technology has probably benefited cable co’s more.  And, the Slingbox is rocking the place restriction.  We’ll see how IP protection requirements will affect Sling’s development.

For the connected world (i.e. 3G coverage areas) there is now a new frontier.  Russell Beattie shares his experience with Orb’s DVREverywhere, the mobile TiVo integration system that streams one’s TiVo content to their 3G phones. (Thanks, Burc)

Users of social networking sites are familiar with versions of the "connect to/link to/accept me, please" request.  But, i bet most have not gotten one with the request in the headline.  With Snubster, now you might.

According to Wired (thanks, Volkan, for the link), Snubster,

Software engineer Bryant Choung intended to satirize social discovery services when he launched his beta site, Snubster, last month. The site lets members create public lists of people and things that rankle them.
….
Lately, Choung says the application he created to poke fun at the
idea of online community is becoming its own place to network. People
surf each others’ hate lists and occasionally make contact.

"It has developed into a sort of community atmosphere," he said. "It
seems as though people find entertainment and connections in finding
other people that hate the same things as them."

We’ve seen other parody sites poking fun at the SNS area; however, I must admit, I like the antisocial networking concept, in that, disliking (or being annoyed by) someone, is in itself, a social act.