ValueWiki Blog

The rumors are true. Congratulations to Howard and WallStrip!

*Howard Lindzon gives a thorough rundown of the acquisition.

*Fred Wilson, the lead investor, gives another interesting take.

*Trader Mike, who seems to have some equity-in-exchange-for-publicity, one of Wallstrip’s founders and investors, also covers the story.

*And TechCrunch covers the deal, albeit, with plenty of criticism in the comments.

Last but not least, WallStrip’s coverage of the WallStrip deal:

Jossip.com is reporting this story, which was soon echoed by TechCrunch. The trouble is, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures claims he didn’t broker the deal, and didn’t invest $500,000 in the company either.

Jossip claims the $5,000,000 deal is mainly to acquire the talents of WallStrip host Lindsay Campbell. Campbell is an aspiring actress who is scheduled to appear on the Sopranos.

Despite Fred Wilson’s public denials and corrections, James Altrucher, who recently sold StockPickr to TheStreet.com, seems to think the story is genuine. Jossip claims the story will be broken early this week, possibly Monday. I’ll put in an email to Howard Lindzon.

In the meantime, you can watch Fred Wilson on WallStrip to read his body language for subliminal clues. He does call WallStrip the “next big thing!”

Update 8:30am Monday: Howard says…”No comment.”

Zach and I attended Twiistup last night, a party for Southern California Web 2.0 startups. SoCal has surpassed New England in startup activity, with $1.22 billion invested in the first quarter of 2007. This makes SoCal second only to Silicon Valley, as was evidenced by the great array of startups on display last night.

The attendees included representatives of many well-known Web 2.0 companies and the turnout was excellent. As you can see, it was like a mosh pit; you practically had to crowd surf to navigate the room.

Before entering the event, I used the bathroom at Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, and only realized around 10:30 than I had not remembered to buckle my belt. Strangely, I don’t think anyone noticed my belt hanging out, probably because it was crowded like a Japanese subway.

I enjoyed talking with a lot of entrepreneurs. We would stand toe to toe and scream over the thumping club music. This was a great test of their pitching abilities, since they had to rapidly convey their concept before their vocal chords snapped. By the end of the night I had my patter down to, “ValueWiki: Wikipedia for stocks.” Or rather, “VALUEWIKI: WIKIPEDIA FOR STOCKS!” “Wikipedia for Socks?” “NO, STOCKS!!!”

Here are some guys from YourMinis (below). Since Netvibes and Google have entered the customized homepage biz, YourMinis is shifting their focus over to widgets. I’ve been debating starting a YourMinis homepage for months, so it was good to meet these guys in person.

Noah and Viet from Mint, a free online Quicken (below). Once Mint knows your monthly expenses, it can show you coupons and targeted ads to help you save on your monthly expenses. They will be launching in the next two months.

Heather was demonstrating her client’s product, Oovoo (below). Oovoo is like iChat except you can video conference multiple people simultaneously. I’m pretty sure the service is free, so I will definitely check it out. Heather also did a good job of promoting BarCamp LA and Geek Dinners, and it was great for her to get the word out.

This is Shane from Userplane (below). They were acquired by AOL last year, and offer a host of media-related widgets that you’ve probably seen on sites like MySpace. The Userplane demo table felt like a frat party. I spent a good deal of time hovering, trying to get someone’s attention, but it was like approaching the popular table in the high school cafeteria. Finally, Shane engaged me and I found him to be one of the most friendly and articulate presenters of the evening.

This is Elizabeth from GoodReads (below). GoodReads lets you share your reading list with your friends and make recommendations. Zach is a big fan of Shelfari, and I enjoy telling people what they should and should not read, so this appealed to me. Elizabeth became one of my favorite presenters of the night when I discovered she was not an entrepreneur, but simply manning the table for her boyfriend Otis who was at the bar. I was tempted to rapid-fire her with questions about API and revenue models, but decided to go easy on her.

What’s Your Blog Called?

It was a great event. I took a lot of photos but very few came out. I would ask an entrepreneur, “can I take your photo for my blog?” And they would politely ask, “What’s your blog called?” To which I would respond, “ValueWiki”, which seems like an odd answer…

What I want to say is, “I work on this great site called ValueWiki (insert pitch here) and we have a blog because every startup has a blog. And I sometimes post two, three, four times a day because I’m relatively interested in the internet and I’m addicted to blog traffic.”

But that’s a long answer.

The simple truth is, telling people your blog is called “ValueWiki” is odd, because “ValueWiki” would be a weird name for a blog. It is, however, an awesome name for a thoroughly wonderful wiki devoted to investing.

Or should I say…”WIKIPEDIA FOR STOCKS!”

“Spocks? Like StarTrek?”

“No, STOCKS!”

“Socks. Got it.”

(deep, existential sigh)

So what’s your revenue model?”

The ever-intriguing Jason Calacanis has showed increasing interest in Wiki lately, interviewing Larry Sanger for his podcast and making occasional appearances on Wikipedia-L. Calacanis, who recently sold Weblogs for $25 Million to AOL, attended Wikimania 2006 and has expressed plans of attending Wikimania 2007.

It now appears Calacanis may have a vested interest in Wiki. ValleyWag is reporting that Jason has already hired 20 engineers to begin building a Google-Wikipedia mashup. The concept is a human-edited search engine that can provide more relevant results than Google’s algorithm.

Sound familiar?

That’s because Jimmy Wales has been working on this idea since at least March, 2004. It’s called Wikia Search and was covered by TechCrunch in December. This competition could help to explain why Jason recently positioned himself against Jimmy Wales with some pretty tough language.

Calacanis claims ValleyWag’s report is 100% untrue. But it is curious how many details ValleyWag was able to report, replete with comments from developers who have seen the prototype. And ValleyWag Overlord Nick Denton seems pretty sure Jason has something up his sleeve. Will be interesting to see what exactly Calacanis is working on, or if I am simply another cog in the rumor mill.

Update: GigaOM has more info today on Calacanis’s Wikipedia-like “Project X.” GigaOM believes the project is more of an editor-controlled content portal, as opposed to a wiki search.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I didn’t know it was going to turn into a hotbed of startup activity. VentureBeat has the scoop.

Venture capitalists invested $1.122 billion into Southern California companies during the first quarter, compared to only $984 million into the Northeast companies centered around Boston, according to VentureOne/Ernst & Young.

VentureBeat reports that Southern California has surpassed the Northeast in VC investment for three straight quarters, proving a trend. Between Silicon Valley and SoCal, the state of California now receives more than half of all North American venture capital money.

TechCrunch announced today that TheStreet.com has acquired their partner site StockPickr. TheStreet.com formerly owned 49.9% of Stockpickr, but has now purchased the remaining 50.1%. Stockpickr was founded and run by former hedge fund manager and published auther, James Altucher.

About TheStreet.com

TheStreet.com (TSCM) was started in 1996 by now-famous investing pundit Jim Cramer. The online investment site did not turn a profit until nine years later, in 2005. Continually expanding its internet presence, on March 8 TheStreet.com announced a distribution deal with Howard Lindzon’s popular Wallstrip.

About StockPickr

StockPickr founder James Altucher has commented that he will remain actively involved with the site, which would indicate TheStreet.com has wisely retained him on an earnout. I wouldn’t be shocked if a similar deal will be announced with Howard Lindzon. TheStreet.com would be wise to pull WallStrip’s popular content in-house, if they have the chance.

The consensus in the Finance 2.0 space is that this deal signals a growing embrace of Web 2.0 innovations by the financial world. This may encourage further experimentation and growth by startups as well as established companies.

Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group announced this weekend their angel round with Spotplex. Robin believes Spotplex is a better Digg.

I interviewed Doyon Kim, CEO of Spotplex last week. Congratulations to Doyon and Spotplex. Will be interesting to see how they grow from here.

Doyon Kim was a co-founder of Dialpad which was acquired by Yahoo in June, 2005. He is also a co-founder of Opinity, the online reputation management site. Doyon is Founder and CEO of Spotplex, a recent spinoff of Opinity.

Jon: Doyon, thank you for talking with ValueWiki about your newest project! So what is Spotplex?

Doyon: Spotplex is a real-time ranking for blog articles based on actual impression counts, not the number of votes or recommendation. In short, people can find what people read most today and thus most interesting news of the day.

I believe Spotplex can connect bloggers with general internet public by providing data with unbiased measures and in diverse subjects.

Jon: How is Spotplex Funded?

Doyon: Initial fund came from Opinity, and we are about to close the seed round from angels.

Jon: I notice Keith Teare on Opinity’s Board. Did he lead Spotplex to TechCrunch?

Doyon: Keith is a good friend of us and also board member of Spotplex. He kindly introduced us to Mike Arrington.

Jon: As an entrepreneur I’m curious. What is it like getting TechCrunch-ed? Did Michael Arrington warn you, or were your servers suddenly on fire?

Doyon: It was quite an experience. I knew we were going to get some visibility, but the level was much more than I expected. Mike did warn us about it and I thought we were ready for the traffic, but apparently not. It was pretty embarrassing. However, it was a good lesson at the same time and now our service architecture is completely redesigned to support mass traffic.

Jon: People have suggested that Spotplex runs the risk of featuring bad articles from popular blogs over good articles from unpopular blogs, simply by favoring high traffic sites. Does Spotplex have plans for making things more democratic?

Doyon: We just released a new relative popularity measure which I am very excited about. Along with existing popular article list based on absolute number of impressions, this new list will provide users with interesting perspectives. This list sorts articles based on how much more traffic an article received compared to the normal traffic level of the blog. I believe it will give bloggers with different sizes equal opportunities to shine.

Jon: Spotplex has the advantage of being harder to game than Digg. On the other hand, Spotplex doesn’t have Digg’s voting and commenting features. How do you plan to attract a community to Spotplex?

Doyon: Now that we released our new relative popularity measure, the next thing we are working on is community building features: commenting, bookmarking, OpenID-based user system…

Jon: How do you feel about being constantly compared to Digg? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Doyon: I knew that we were going to be compared to Digg even before we launched. Ultimately, what we are trying to provide to end users are same. People are constantly looking for information and interesting news and we both are trying to satisfy the needs. We just have different methods.

I have to admit in some cases Digg can be a better than Spotplex, especially if the subject is technology oriented. A recommendation of an technology expert should count more than a visit by a random person. When my interest aligns with that of Diggers, Digg produces excellent results for me. However, the subject coverage should be limited to what this voting group is interested in and the outcome tends to be biased to their opinions. Even though now Digg became a huge community, it is still small group of people in total internet population, and I don’t think they can represent the whole internet population effectively. For example, I don’t think this group is very interest in how my Michigan football team is going to play next season.

By the way, I don’t think it is a bad thing to be compared to Digg at all. Digg is one of the most popular and successful Web 2.0 companies and I did enjoy using their services after all.

Jon: What’s next for Spotplex?

Doyon: I think we only built the basic platform for our service. There are so many things we need to do or we CAN do with this platform. One of the things which differentiate us from the others is the type of data we collect by doing this service. We receive huge amount of impression data from all those blogs. We are only counting them at this point, but by analyzing the data even further, we can produce pretty interesting results. For the people who ready a certain article, we might be able to make a good recommendation for other articles they would like, for example.

Jon: Thank you Doyon for taking the time to talk with ValueWiki. Best of luck on Spotplex!

Dominic Mazzoni is the creator and lead developer of the Audacity Audio Editor, one of the most downloaded open source projects on the internet…with over one million downloads per month. Dominic attended the Claremont Colleges and currently works for Google.

Dominic talks with ValueWiki about Audacity, wikis, and the future of open source…

Jon: Dominic, thank you for talking with ValueWiki! First off, how did you get started on Audacity? Where did you get the idea?

Dominic: I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and I was trying to learn more about techniques for computers to understand and analyze music. One of my dreams has been to someday write software
that can automatically transcribe music - listen to a recording and write out sheet music. Anyway, in order to explore these algorithms I needed audio editing software to modify to help me visualize things. Most of the existing software I found wasn’t open-source, which meant that I couldn’t learn how it worked or modify it, and the small amount of open-source software only worked on one operating system, for example only Windows or only Linux. I wanted something that everyone could use. So, I started writing my own audio editor. I never expected it to get as popular as it is today.

Jon: Was Audacity always open-source? When did SourceForge come into the picture?

Dominic: When I started Audacity I was a college student, and in academia most people share their source code because it’s a great way for other
people to learn to become better software developers. Plus, I had
benefitted greatly from other open-source software and learned much
of what I know today by studying how it works. So I always wanted
Audacity to be open-source. Audacity was released under the General
Public License about nine months after I started working on it.
Sourceforge had only been around for a few months at that time, in
the spring of 2000, but it seemed like a great deal: they were
offering a free website and lots of free developer tools for any open
source project.

Jon: In your unbiased opinion…How does Audacity compare to Garageband and other Audio editing software?

Dominic: Garageband is a great tool for creating original voice and music recordings. It’s extremely elegant and slick, I totally love their interface and I love using it. Two problems: one is that it’s only for Mac, and second that it’s extremely limited. If all you want to do is record yourself singing and playing the guitar, or you want to record a podcast, then assuming you already have a Mac, Garage Band may be all you need. But Garage Band is not a general-purpose audio
editor by any means, and it is a terrible tool for copying an LP or cassette to your computer and cleaning it up to burn to a CD, for example.

I will freely admit that Garage Band is superior to Audacity at the things that Garage Band does best. But it’s not a great comparison because Audacity does so much more.

A more direct comparison is Adobe Audition, formerly Cool Edit. Audacity and Audition have similar feature sets and similar goals. Audition is in many ways more mature and polished than Audacity, but it most definitely has a lot of quirks. Audacity has three main advantages: one, it works on all major computer platforms instead of just Windows, two, it’s free, and three, most people find Audacity easier to use.

Profesional audio engineers most commonly use Pro Tools. Pro Tools is far more powerful than Audacity ever will be, and it’s hard to compare them directly because Pro Tools is a complete solution for creating and producing music, not just an editing tool. But the great thing about Audacity is that because it’s free, you don’t have to pick and choose. I’ve heard from dozens of professional audio engineers who use Pro Tools, Logic Audio, Audition, and lots of other expensive commercial tools - but they also use Audacity as one of their tools, because Audacity just happens to do one thing they need really well.

Audacity is still the only audio editor that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Jon: I’m curious about the numbers. How many developers have worked on Audacity? Can you estimate the total number of downloads? Total number of countries?

Dominic: Most of Audacity has been written by about 8-9 developers over the last 8 years, but several dozen people have contributed code. We also have several other members of the Audacity team who aren’t
software developers, but they help out in other ways, for example writing documentation, answering user emails, translating Audacity into other languages, and beta testing.

There have been over 22 million downloads directly from our website, and the current rate is over a million downloads per month. That doesn’t count the millions of copies of Audacity that are legally
distributed from other websites or included free in promotional CD-ROMs from magazines like PC World.

Matt Brubeck deserves the credit for making it possible to translate Audacity into other languages. The great thing about open-source software is that anyone can do the translation - someone who speaks a
foreign language can just download a file of the phrases to translate and email us the results, and bingo, Audacity is suddenly available to millions of people who speak that language. Audacity has been
translated into over 30 languages so far.

Jon: Who started the Audacity wiki? I see it already has 900 registered users - that’s terrific. How do you see the wiki helping the Audacity community?

Dominic: The wiki was started by the Audacity developers; we love wikis and it seemed like a great easy way to hold all of the extra information that didn’t exactly belong in the documentation or elsewhere on our
website. It’s been enormously successful. One of the things I love about it is that people don’t just help by adding content, they help by organizing existing content. I come back after not seeing it for a few weeks to find that people have organized sections into new categories and in general made everything easier to read, and I love it.

In fact, we love wikis so much that we’re writing the next version of the Audacity user guide using wiki software. It’s not open to the general public for quality control reasons, but having it on a wiki makes it easy for anyone in the developer community to quickly make changes with almost no effort. We then intend to use software to convert the text of the wiki to HTML and PDF for everyone else to view.

Jon: What do you see in the future for Audacity?

Dominic: I hope to see more commercial involvement with Audacity, which I think will help with its maturity. We’ve had a few companies sponsor the development of certain features that they needed in Audacity, and
if this trend continues I’d like to see one or more developers working on Audacity full time, rather than now where most of us work on Audacity in our spare time, and only occasionally for pay.

Jon: How do you see the future of opensource? Do you feel that support for opensource is growing or shrinking on the internet? Any predictions?

Dominic: Open source is huge and it’s growing. When Audacity was released in 2000, most people had never used open source software and no business based on open source software had ever made a profit. Today almost everyone has used open source software such as Firefox, OpenOffice, or BitTorrent, possibly without even knowing it. And more than 60% of websites on the Internet use open source software to run their site, including ValueWiki!

Jon: I just noticed, you’re one of the few people I know who is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article! Have you checked it out? Out of curiosity, are you a Wikipedian?

Dominic: It’s kind of fun that someone found me notable enough to add a Wikipedia article about me, albeit a short one. I do occasionally edit Wikipedia myself, on a wide range of topics including programming languages, music theory, and accessibility.

Jon: Thank you for taking time to chat with ValueWiki. Best of luck on Audacity!

Dominic: Thanks, Jon!

InstantBull.com aggregates 8 stock message board sites into one easy-to-navigate location. It also frames the content of about 100 major stock blogs, and all the major finance sites such as Reuters, Yahoo, Bloomberg, and Forbes.

Features

InstantBull features a “hot list” which generates a tag cloud of stock tickers, representing the most searched topics for each day. You can fully navigate the universe of financial websites without ever leaving the comfort of InstantBull.com. CEO and founder Gal Arav has built a nifty piece of speedy technology. InstantBull has been featured in BusinessWeek and Barron’s.

Why is InstantBull Allowed to do This?

Because you are viewing content through frames, InstantBull does not pull traffic, unique visitors, or ad clicks away from the sites it monitors. If you do click an InstantBull ad, don’t think of this as content-poaching, think of it as compensating InstantBull for creating a unique and speedy search tool.

Concerns

My one concern for the company would be that InstantBull divorces content from community. I imagine it is harder to develop a loyal following when you allow people to view a discussion but not participate. In the long run, I think community sites will always generate more user loyalty and popularity.

InstantBull currently has an Alexa rank of 635,322 despite having media attention that ValueWiki would salivate over. Of course, InstantBull is extremely young, and was only launched last July.

An Interesting Research Tool

Google performs a service that is so useful they don’t require community features to pull in visitors. As InstantBull continually expands and tweaks its feature set, I imagine it can easily become an integral part of an investors tool kit.

I am currently fully invested. But the next time I am trolling for stocks, I will take InstantBull for a spin to how it impacts my due diligence process.