Merry Christmas 2005!

Sternennacht by Vincent van Gogh
“Sternennacht” by Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Weihnacht

Ein Augenblick im Meer der Zeiten,
In dem die stillen Stimmen tönen,
Die sonst der Tag verdeckt mit seinem lauten schrei’n
Der Augenblick, indem die Kerzen brennen,
Die heiligen Kerzen, die der Liebe leuchten,
Da jedes Herz es ahnt was Friede sei. -

In dieser Stille zwischen heut und morgen,
In dieser Handvoll weniger Minuten,
Besinnt der Mensch sich auf sein tiefstes Glück
Lauscht auf die leise Melodie der Liebe -
Und geht dann neu zu seinem Tag zurck.

Elisabeth Dauthendey (1854-1943)

I wish you all a merry and relaxing christmas time with your family and friends.

meebo funded by Sequoia Capital

The web-based instant messenger application meebo has received first-round funding from Sequoia Capital, as meebo confirmed last Friday. The funding is rumored to be between USD 3.0m and USD 4.0m with USD 9.0m pre-money as sources reveal.

The young team (first-time entrepreneurs) – two IT girls from Stanford and one boy, who was with IBM and is a Yale graduate – only started with meebo 13 weeks ago and did manage to attrack major attention right from the start. With over 250,000 users daily using the in Ajax programmed application in order to chat over one or multiple IMs (MSN, AIM/ICQ, Jabber/GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger) simultaneously meebo is still in “alpha mode”. All in all, quite ambitious plans Sequoia has with them in order to judge this high valuation. Will be interesting to see how their business model evolves.

Technorati tags: meebo Sequoia Capital VentureCapital IM Ajax web2.0

del.icio.us acquired by Yahoo!

Quite a buzz about Yahoo!’s recent web 2.0 acquistion has been announced last Friday – both by Yahoo! as well as from del.icio.us.

With focus to one of the two VCs having been invested in del.icio.us this is just another trade sale to Yahoo!. BV Capital already sold eGroups to Yahoo! in 2000. However, for the leading VC Union Square Ventures it was definitely a time to celebrate after they hold their investment only eight months.

43 Places

After I have discovered the travel website 43 Places closer this week, I could not resist to enter as much places I went to in the past and those I would like to visit in the future. The degree of interaction among users is stunning. Others can cheer on your goals, subscribe to your travel activities and comment on these. Additionally, every location can be tagged and these tags are connected to del.icio.us or Technorati – pics are linked to Flickr tags. It’s real fun exploring others opinions about places you wanna visit.

Currently, 43 Places has over 27,500 user – growing with about 1.5% per day – after its launch July 27, 2005. The team behind 43 Places is Robot Co-op, who already setup 43 Things and recently All Consuming – both more market research sites where user’s can be targeted very precisely with ads. Read some background information about 43 Things here. I am curious how they will develop 43 Places further, not only in terms of technology used – so far only cumbersome manuel entry is possible – but more in terms of their implemented business model – hopefully it goes beyond just ads.

Technorati tags: 43Places 43Things MoSoSo