DISQUS

Hey Andrew, if you want to break out from the Valley echo chamber you should give us a call. Our team is from London, Portland, Boston and Cardiff. We're coming to the valley next week.

London based Badoo is growing like a weed right now: http://badoo.com. Like fotolog it has a pretty international audience and a very simple, well oiled proposition with a lot of familiar viral elements you spoke about.

Yeah, so why is this news?

Lightbox (http://lightboxit.com) and Techlightnment (http://techlightenment.com) do this as well.

When did mashable become a portal for free advertising?

Peepflow.com is contact management with a twist. It launches mid august publically.

Sign up for the beta on http://peepflow.com

Another cool flickr mashup is http://puzpix.com - flickr puzzles, done against the clock.

and Livechat2im.com

Spreadshirt are backed by Accel to the tune of $1.5m.

But Lukas and his team are very famous for bootstrapping their way to $10m turnover without any venture capital whatsoever. Spreadshirt have a great story.

Hi, Livechat2im is actually different because none of the other sites allow for multiple chatters at the same time.

This is where livechat2im have actually solved this problem relative to plugoo etc. Also livechat2im can add multiple im accounts to the same chat box.

This sort of sclability hasn't been solved before (see disclaimer on plugoo's site.

This arguably makes this product much much more useful!

Mike, thats bullshit. Limelight are profitable and are in a growing space. Also doing a tech IPO in the states means they are under the full wrath o sarbannes oxley. If Limelight were 5 months old thats frothy, but no its not the start of the bubble again. This time its real business or no business.

Hey John,

Happy new year. Zopa recently opened a silicon valley office. They will launch a public US service very soon, hence giving prosper some competition. Zopa was founded in mid-2005 and is starting to pick up in the UK.

Maybe give the SV office a shout,

Sumon

Only an idiot wouldn't chart the number of times the term web 2.0 was used in mashable posts per month. Come on pete, THATS what the highs and lows of web 2.0 should really mean.......

See peopleradar.com which is hotornot using the facebook API.

Trusted places are actually having their first invite-only event on the 3rd of Nov for their best reviewers. So if you don't know you better get reviewing!

Thats some "seriously blinged up" graphic design. Maybe a dotster intern initiated a change of tactic. Interesting move

Surely there is a lock in period and only the investment banks are getting giddy at these figures. If the stock tanks in the next 6 months (or 12 months, whatever the lock in is) the guy most certainly won't be a billionaire. Its paper money for now! The guy is not a billionaire yet.

Protopage just launched protopuppy, pretty cute. Should add to the prettiness.

http://www.protopage.com/protopuppy

Apparently version 3 is up and coming from their blog. Should be interesting to see whats cooking when it launches.

Pete,
Don't forget www.protopage.com, from London. That makes it 4 start page start ups in Europe. Also if you consider mad4milk's mooglets (Rome, Italy), that makes it five.

Europe is clearly the startpage innovator.

Sumon

See www.amiworthit.com for the college market

Yeah I noticed the word reversal later. But I can't be the only one with that reaction.

The Tagline is the trademarked tagline of Yelp (www.yelp.com)

Apple's business model depends upon DRM. Anyway this no DRM is for unsigned bands and if it proves to be a strong distribution model we can imagine more established bands following suit. Its going to be an interesting 12 months.

Music consumption is a perfect activity to take advantage of the network effects of myspace.

Congrats to Shawn Fanning.

I think this walled garden startegy is a way of segmenting its audience more clearly to deliver appropriate premium content. I think recent distribution deals with content providers may have stipulated that YouTube must develop more targetted ways of delivering video content. This has to be something they were forced into.

My impression of the Univillage user experience when i looked was that it was a little bit over featured and a slower feature deployment wouldn't have spoiled the surprise, but i guess i'm a little bit older than the bebo-weaned highschoolers that are going to use Univillage.

should be iChums.com above

Univillage will have to counter Facebook penetration in Uk universities. With the majority of three generations of students above on Facebook in most universities Univillage will probably fail to break the network effect. Most likely if they are giving away free music people will take that and leave. I would be surprised if UniVillage can make a dent into the Facebook stranglehold in the UK. I write this as I've been on Facebook for about a year and a half.

While switching costs may be low, radicalisation is required to create a core of active, addicted users. iChum.com tried this last year in the UK and failed, but they weren't as better funded as Univillage. Its failed once before :)