I have been trying to get to Yahoo.com but have been getting a network timeout… server taking too long to respond. Ouch, as if Yahoo! didn’t have enough problems… what’s going on?

Congratulations to Alicia and the team on the latest round of funding! It’s a great space to be in and Consorte is poised for great success… visit their website to learn more!

This is really funny actually. Thanks to Todd Sawicki for this one.

Heading out tomorrow to NYC for ad-tech, so I will see you there. Contact me at rob (at) fynbosgroup.com if you want to meet up at or around the event. It’s going to be fun-tacular, I can just tell.

Saw an ad for AdReady.com on my blog — which I guess makes sense. Very interesting services (making ads for you quickly and easily), worth checking out. If I had time to actually build a real readership for this blog I might actually spend some time figuring out what would be interesting ads on the site. I did spend a bit of time creating some advertising archaeology (kind of a web 0.5 arts and crafts project if you would) over on my Facebook Better-ads group. Check out my Facebook profile for details.

More bad news from Citigroup. There’s a lot of cleaning up still to do in this market… online too.

Today I joined the team at Consorte Media in San Francisco as COO. Here is my updated LinkedIn profile. I’d previously consulted for the company and really enjoyed working with everyone there! Our focus is on connecting companies with Hispanic consumers. I’m excited to be a part of the organization, and am looking forward tremdously to helping the company continue to grow exponentially in the months and years ahead!

I will continue to work in a very limited advisory capacity with a few selected firms that do not overlap in scope with Consorte, and Fynbos Group will be happy to refer people to some of the consultant contacts we’ve been fortunate enough to get to know over the past 6 months. I also have been starting to become a conduit for recruiters looking for VP-level talent in the online space, so let me know if you are looking for something exciting and what you’re interested in and who knows…

So… as of now I encourage any folks involved in marketing or advertising.to Hispanic users to drop me a line at rob at consortemedia dot com!

Seeming to be aimed partially at college students who use Facebook and are fascinated by it, partially at engineers who aspire to work for a hot Valley startup, and all the various once-or-twice removed people-permutations and intersections thereof — the so-called Facebook Book, Inside Facebook, Life, Work and Visions of Greatness will no doubt make for interesting reading. I’ve read the excerpt about it and will probably pony up the $12 ($9 for students) to get the whole thing (it’s more a question of having the time to read it really). This is an interesting paid-content take on the whole employee-blogs/open-the-kimono approach we’re seeing with many startup businesses especially here in Silicon Valley. Though of course there is always irony such as the testimonial on the “buy it” page where there is an endorsement from “Ariel McNichol, CEO of mEgo, a stealth startup”. It’s either stealth startups or share-info-with-everyone startups these days it seems.

I’m not sure if the author Mr Baloun “will lead and inspire you towards your greatest potential”, but it certainly might give some chuckles and Nudist on the Late Shift-esque insights.

I came across this Red Herring article discussing Alan Meckler (Jupitermedia CEO, for whom I worked as recently as 2003, mostly before the company’s transition to being a stock photo powerhouse). Shutterfly indeed looks like a weakish company to be going public considering how relatively closed the public markets have been of late and how competitive its category is. There are plenty of profitable online companies that would seem to have better prospects, so the next 6-12 months should prove exceedingly interesting if the broad market and IPO markets improve as they well could. That being said SFLY is down to about $12.40 a share ($266mm marketcap) as of this writing, and perhaps heading further southward…

I didn’t actually listen to these interviews (much harder to “skim” one of these things - who has this time?) talking about Web 2.0. I am rather tired of this silly catch-all term and think it’s time to move on and be more specific/ descriptive about whatever-it-is that Web 2.0 is/has come to signify. Here’s the definitive definition from O’Reilly. The web is indeed a platform, not much news there, and to me things like “Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models” say more about the corporate structures and natural evolution of really small technology companies (many located in SV) not a real “movement”. I think Web 2.0 is “expired”: unfortunately I’m not in the “coining” game anymore (though I like micro-accounting and will keep using that one), so I’ll probably leave it to others to advance our internet-related lexicon here in Silicon Valley.

Great quote from Mike Clauss today (originally from Spy Game) where he was talking in reference to a lot of companies out there looking to do deals — everyone wants twice the sex with half the foreplay.

Too true — everyone is running around doing deals and looking to do deals again, and sometimes it’s moving a lot quicker than the firms themselves have capacity to deal with! We’re going to get Mike to start blogging soon, so stay tuned!

The next two days are doing to be crazy here in San Francisco. It’s the AdTech trade show and already I have seemingly endless meetings and booth-driveby’s set up for the next two days. I just want to apologize in advance for anyone I don’t see, see but aren’t able to talk to, inadvertently avoid or miss, don’t recognize or forgot to set something up with in advance
I barely have time to blog during the regular workweek let alone this one, and since I’m not going to be in any of the sessions it is unlikely I’ll have idle time to post on my thoughts, but I just want to let people know I’ve been having a lot and will find some time SOON to commit them to blog!

An interesting list of web 2.0 companies that has been compiled here.

A shout out to my friend and former colleague, Owen McCumber, who now has a blog where he shares some of his thoughts on media buying.

Way back a couple of years ago, I thought IAC was a likely buyer for NexTag (disclaimer- I used to work for NexTag), but then it didn’t seem like Diller thought comparison shopping was all that. With their continuing success in the mortgage lead business, however, John DeMayo now says that NexTag may be close to doing a deal to be acquired by LendingTree (part of IAC).

GetSmart hasn’t added a lot of value to LendingTree, by all accounts, and NexTag is very smart about unbranded acquisition compared to LendingTree’s strong brand and multi-channel advertising. So this might be an interesting one - interesting thought on how they would be integrated given IAC’s comparison shopping efforts (building) and previous history of (not necessarily) integration acquisitions.

Another silly story about someone getting fired for posting something fairly innocuous on the Web, except this time it was somebody I know. Andrew and I used to work together (in the same group in fact) at Jupiter Research, back in the day when it was Jupiter Communications and it was kind of cool. Andrew - if you need to get out of Dodge and need a place to stay on the West Coast, just let us know.

Gosh, if I hear the term “Web 2.0″ one more time, I think I’m going to scream! People, let’s drop this annoying little term right now please!

This weekend while at the gym, I had a flash of inspiration - (very ironic actually) something I wanted to put on a tshirt - and I was able to quickly convert it into something tangible when I got home using a custom t-shirt shop (created by SpreadShirt) that they recently helped us put together. [nice thing is you don't necessarily have to include a LinkedIn logo when you create an item, you can upload your own design/s]

It bears repeating that these types of enterprises, and others that allow you to create direct mail pieces from the comfort of your own computer, design a logo, create a product prototype etc., not to mention the prevalence of outsourcing are taking us very quickly to a place where it’s really easy for someone super-small to act big, to compete alongside much larger organizations in form AND function.

The evolution of that on the advertising side still has a long way to go, but Google and Overture have done a lot to democratize things for small companies. It’s actually possible to be amazed both at how far we’ve come and also how incredibly stubborn the existing ad market has proved and is still going to prove to be to dislodge. If true context/relevance of a product or service to my needs is the ultimate winner online, a lot of what we take for granted as advertising will (and should) go away.

I’m probably really late on this, but I found this Flash-based RSS reader/aggregator, NewsMonkey, to be very cool. Check it out.

Looks like Indeed raised some money from the New York Times and others… SimplyHired (who is a LinkedIn partner) recently had an influx of cash as well.

This morning’s latest Internet M&A news (and continuing the recent trend of traditional media companies jumping back into the online space) is that News Corp. is buying Intermix Media and its highly-successful MySpace.com. A contact of mine pointed out that MySpace did 3.9 billion US page views in May according to NetRatings, which put them in the #6 spot right behind Google and ahead of IAC, Amazon, AskJeeves and Craigslist. They had 9.8 million uniques (putting them 58th in reach, which number is also probably understated due to undercounting of the college population) in the US but those people spent on average 1hr40mins on MySpace during the month. However, the financials of the firm are not stellar just yet from a profitability perspective.

The purchase price of $580 million in cash is just a 12 percent premium over Intermix’s current price… which means they feel they’re pretty much fairly valued by the market for their +-$100mm run-rate revenue and modest earnings. Update - Bill Burnham http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2005/07/myspace_equals_.html“>gets into the VCs’ financials. Sounds like VantagePoint made out pretty well here…