twopointouch

I reckon the ‘Time Person of the Year is You’ story (please see what looks like nearly every other blog) has probably been exhausted for whatever wisdom it may have contained. It’s still worth a dip inside, though, for the Web 2.0 article backing up the choice.

Five reasons that ‘bubble 2.0′ is different from the last:

Pain: Since today’s investments are ‘nanopotatos’ compared to those of ‘99, companies that fail won’t ruin their investors.

Profit: While it took eight years for Amazon to become profitable, today’s companies either want (or need) to be profitable fast, or at least show huge numbers of users, so they’ll be interesting to the big boys.

Bill Gates: Bill who? Sergey and Larry are the kings of Web 2.0. Dave Winer quoted saying that Web 2.0 companies are simply ‘acting as sales reps for Google ads’.

Food: Apparently, Om Malik didn’t have to buy dinner for three months at a time during the dotcom boom. Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. (boo!)

Burn Rate: Remember that expression? Referred to how quickly companies could eat through the massive investments they’d received from VCs. Since they don’t get quite such large investments nowadays, companies are supposedly eking out their resources a lot more carefully.

All of this tallies with what everyone’s been telling me for the last six months. You can’t really have a bubble unless the properties in the market are vastly over-valued. While the YouTube acquisition for $1.65bn still sounds like an extraordinary amount of money, we’re not hearing stories like that very often. There’s also very few IPOs – I believe the European business networking site Xing is the only company in this category to do so. While this is partly down to increased and expensive financial legislation in the US – Sarbanes Oxley and the like, I think it’s also down to the realisation that today such offerings are unlikely to bring in much more money than the companies are worth.

All good news, I think – apart from the ‘no free lunch’ bit.