PRE SERIES A

More Like Sleepapedia

preseriesa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:54:52 +0000

Wikipedia epitomizes a successful, open-source application. Thanks to helpful users and a staff of editors, the information has become more and more accurate over the years, making it one of the most successful (and useful) research tools on the web. Oh, and it’s free. Cheers to that. Now, however, Shiny Development has decided to capitalize on Wikipedia and give us Speakapedia, which allows you to PAY ACTUAL MONEY to LISTEN to whatever Wikipedia posts you’d like on your mac, iPod or iPhone. Nothing like paying for a new way to fall asleep in your car, on a date, or in class. Nice job Shiny Development. What’s next? Can you charge me to watch my friends’ Tweets via Skype?

Just head straight down Abysmal Avenue and make a right at Wejustconnedsomeinvestors Lane

preseriesa — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:54:16 +0000

In the earliest stages of the commercial web there were virtual malls exploding all over your crappy browser. These brilliant leaps forward in technology allowed people to click around poorly jpegged storefronts for all of their casual clothing needs instead of typing in pesky urls or, god forbid, typipng a retailer into a search engine. It was just like the horrid experience of going to a real mall, except you were in your underwear and it was somehow infinitely shittier. Thank god that lunacy is behind us. We’ve moved on. Oh, wait - Yoowalk hasn’t. Who needs virtual retail malls when you can have: the whole goddam internet as a mall. Brilliant.

Your Sex Life is Still in Alpha

preseriesa — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:48:09 +0000

Imagine a website where you could track every time you have sex on a “Web 2.0″ calendar. Now imagine the donkeys who came up with such a brutally stupid idea. Now picture their Bedpost account - month after month without a single entry.

Just ‘Cause Apple Did It, Doesn’t Mean You Should

preseriesa — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:25:52 +0000

Ever since Apple gave us Cover Flow in iTunes, hordes of companies have deduced that thinking different means seeing different, mistakenly concluding that visual is the new textual, . Thanks to cover flow, useless sites have been created to browse online shopping, scrapbooks, and news. There’s nothing like judging news by its cover.

As if those weren’t slow and cumbersome enough, two more nightmare visual-browsing experiences surfaced recently and, since they’re similar, we thought we’d give you two-for-one. The two new sites, Search Me and FavThumbs, take your Search Results and your Del.icou.us bookmarks, respectively, and turn them into super-fun images. What makes anyone think that browsing web sites visually makes sense? Honestly, have you ever gone to Google and typed in “cheap apartments” and thought to yourself, “the description of what this site does is great, but if only I could look at it before committing to clicking.” And if you have, fuck you, you liar. If people wanted to browse their sites visually, do you think anyone would have ever visited My Space, You Tube or Digg?

While a cute idea for the minuscule amount of people who want to reminisce about the age of album art, cover flow has no place online. There’s nothing usable about it and no one thinks it’s fun. So, to anyone out there thinking people want to experience restaurant listings, plumbing services, flight booking or anything else by sliding from image to image, all we can is: Stop. Stop, right now. Back away from the computer all the way to the window and do all of us a favor by jumping out of it.

Solipsism Has a New Name: Non-Society

preseriesa — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:09:11 +0000

Julia Allison and her girlfriends, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin, “started a company.” That’s so cute. Now you can watch girls with daddy issues play dress up and go to work just like real adults. Too bad somebody at one of the parties they bring their dogs to didn’t tell them that aggregating Tumblrs of a few sad and desperate lives isn’t a company, it’s public masturbation. This crap is about as relevant as the Aerosmith song playing over their intro video, which brings us the touching story of 3 girls proving to a hopeful and eager world how fun and crazy they are. You GO, girls!

NonSociety 101 from NonSociety on Vimeo.

Brag All You Want…No One’s Reading

preseriesa — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:03:57 +0000

June 30 saw the launch of the Web’s newest, much needed social network: BragThis.com, which finally gives us all the opportunity to check our modesty at the door and brag about whatever we want. These “boasts,” as the BragThis team calls them, allow users to show off their achievements by entering their sworn testimony, adding evidence (in the form of audio, video and photos) and, just to hammer the point further into your skull, subpoenaing witnesses (your friends?) to help prove you actually did these things.

Forget for a moment that this site is yet another asinine, unneeded, useless slice of dirt pie adding clutter to the already crowded social space. Why would someone ever go to a site that none of the people they know are on and then feel the need to boost their ego by bragging about something that only they really care about.

BragThis has the answer: “Considered a loser in high school? Pay’em back with how many hard boiled eggs you can eat in 10 minutes. ”

Their target market is people who were considered losers in high school? Riiight, because those of us who were losers in high school really want to put ourselves out there for more ridicule from total strangers.

Wait, but there’s incentive. If you do post a “boast,” you could receive receive digital certificates, awards, trophies and points, which may lead to a feature on the BragThis leaderboard. We’re not just bragging, we’re competing with strangers to see who can brag about themselves the best. According to the BragThis press release, “It’s about winning, not how you play the game.” Really gives new meaning to the term Biggest Loser, doesn’t it?

If that’s still not enough incentive, you can bring your “boasts” to other social networks, or “show them off on t-shirts, mugs, hats, and more!”

I can’t wait to see someone on the street wearing their BragThis T-shirt and “boast” about how I punched them in the face.

Impossibly Stupid Idea: Self-Destructing Private Messages

preseriesa — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:20:03 +0000

You know how sometimes you send out an email and wish you could retract it before the other person reads it? Well Privnote doesn’t solve that problem. In fact, Privnote doesn’t solve any problems at all. That’s maybe because nobody needs YET ANOTHER WAY TO MESSAGE PEOPLE. Did I mention that the whole catch is that you can make the messages self-destruct? Read that sentence again. With totally unnecessary solutions to non-existent privacy and security problems like this we expect Uruguayan consultancy Insophia’s attempt to branch out into product dev should be over in about 3….2….

SocialMedian: The Social News Site A 5-Year Old Would Think Of

preseriesa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:46:58 +0000

Perhaps you already know the story about SocialMedian and its founder Jason Goldberg. He’s the one who started the jobs site with the derivative name Jobster. It raised a ton of money, never really had anything to show for it, and Goldberg was forced out. Not just forced out of the company, but forced out of the West Coast. Well, he left Seattle and moved to New York to start in a place where his reputation didn’t precede him.

SocialMedian used to be the name of his blog, but now it’s his social news startup. Now before we get to explaining what SocialMedia is, ask yourself: If you asked a 5-year old to come up with a social news site, what’s the most obvious, simple idea they’d come up with? You guessed it. You make friends, everyone submits some links of what they’re reading, and the site tells you the most popular shit your friends are reading. That’s SocialMedian, it’s that simple. Nevermind the fact that there are already sites doing stuff way more advanced. Nevermind the fact that this requires everyone you know to join yet another site for it to be even marginally useful. And nevermind the fact that it’s based on the tired notion that you really care what your friends are reading.

As far as we know, SocialMedian is just Jason, a development team India, and we’re shocked to learn that he’s even raised seed money from WashingtonPost Interactive (this should be the poster boy for Pre Series A, since in fact that’s what SocialMedian is).

Perhaps more hilarious than the site itself is its founder, and his attempts to get attention for it. Let’s take a look at Goldberg’s latest activity on Twitter:

socialmedian @dannysullivan Track Venture Capital News from 100+ sources. http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join. 22 minutes ago from web in reply to dannysullivan

socialmedian @om Track Venture Capital Funding News from 100+ sources. http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join. 23 minutes ago from web in reply to om

socialmedian @techcrunch Track Venture Capital Funding News from 100+ sources http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join. 23 minutes ago from web in reply to TechCrunch

socialmedian @scobleizer Track Venture Capital Funding News from 100+ sources. http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join. 24 minutes ago from web in reply to Scobleizer

socialmedian @scobleizer Track Venture Capital Funding News from 100+ sources. http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join. 24 minutes ago from web in reply to Scobleizer

socialmedian @mashable Track Venture Capital News from 100+ sources. http://tinyurl.com/6mmylq anyone can now join.@ 24 minutes ago from web in reply to mashable

Yep, this is the new face of startup marketing. Just annoy some top bloggers on Twitter and hope they notice. It’s the web 2.0 equivalent of standing outside of a reporter’s office, hoping show off your shiny new gizmo. It’s spam without the shame.

Plurk: It’s Like Twitter, But Sideways!

preseriesa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:17:31 +0000

Plurk is like Twitter. The difference is that Twitter is organized vertically, and Plurk is sideways, on a timeline. That’s pretty much it. Plurk is also a place to put thoughts that are too trivial or mundane to go on Twitter (really). That part is sad, cause it means that 140-character “Tweets” are how people express their deep thoughts. It’s also ridiculous, because most “Tweets” are already painfully trivial.

Another aspect of Plurk is its karma system. Yep, as you use the system and amass friends, your karma score goes up. Your karma score goes down, however, as people un-follow your and reject your friend requests. The basic idea is to keep it a non-commercial, with a paucity of spamming. Fine. But what do you get for your higher karma? Can you redeem your score for anything of value? Nope. It gets you access to — wait for it — advanced smileys. Take a breath. Elite users get to use smileys that the rest of the plebes don’t have access to. That’s it.

Finally, a brief statement on Plurk’s design. Imagine ordering a meal from a restaurant, but before they served it to you, they fed it to a pig that chewed it up, and then regurgitated it on your plate. It would bring a new definition to “a pig’s lunch”. That’s Plurk for ya. There’s the aforementioned smileys. That’s one problem. Then there’s the fact that when you mouse over certain posts, the box expands for no apparent reason. It’s just all blinky and shit. Also, a few times when we clicked on someone’s profile, it went through some cockamamie URL redirect. Why? No clue. For understandable reasons, folks are hungry for a Twitter alternative that doesn’t crash. But sorry… Plurk definitely ain’t it.

Make social networks suck even more: In 3D!

preseriesa — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:54:50 +0000

Exit Reality is such a bafflingly dumb idea it may make you think investors are picking startups just to seem cool to their teenage daughters (hint: 3D worlds aren’t cool). This brilliant piece of technology makes you walk around a virtual room of someone’s social network profile instead of looking at a normal web page (scrolling is just so BORING, innit?).

To add insult to injury Carl’s Jr. is on board as their first partner. What synergy! You may as well check it out because I know you were on your way over to the Carls Jr site anyway. Don’t worry - you’ll get to install a plugin and fill out registrations forms when you get there.

CEO Duncan Jones is apparently one of those guys that goes around saying things like “it’s an interactive value add for social networks.” Thanks, Duncan. Also, thanks for making this hilarious video proving that you should never be allowed to touch a mouse again.