Kerching! - New dot com boom

[Francko]

It was considerably more than £10. In fact it gave me the deposit to put on a BTL. Not much by some people standards but I like that - use one artificial boom to make money out of another and so on ad infinitum

Now that is proper capitalism

Threaded managed to buy Denmark with his first contracts.

[PAH]

Personally, I can't see it being more than a flash in the pan success.

Like many internet start-ups, the real money is in squirreling away the cash from the VC mugs, or managing to somehow convince a buyer that your online business is worth 200 million, when any real profit is still projected to be 5 years away.

I'm still convinced there's opportunities for us web developers to knock up a successful site, working from home, and with little resource or investment. Just waiting for AtW's eBook to help me finalise the small details.

[BrilloPad]

Like many internet start-ups, the real money is in squirreling away the cash from the VC mugs, or managing to somehow convince a buyer that your online business is worth 200 million, when any real profit is still projected to be 5 years away.

I'm still convinced there's opportunities for us web developers to knock up a successful site, working from home, and with little resource or investment. Just waiting for AtW's eBook to help me finalise the small details.

just as long as you are not waiting on an economic forecast.

[MrRobin]

£7.4m valued for a company that sends out some text messages to people in pub quizes?! Do they hold any assets that even come close to this figure? I doubt it... Jeezus.. this is why the dotcom crash happened in the first place wasn't it? Massive overvaluations on companies with no tangable assets and only vague and very optimistic forecasts on future growth that actually turn out to be unsustainable because the market would be saturated if it really was that profitable.

[Clippy]

A family members internet start has just got another round of VC cash-£350million.....


nice work if you can get it.

<cough> BULLS**T.

[Jog On]

I’m in with both feet

[Platypus]

a flash in the pan success.

That would be perfect! One flash in the pan, £1m and I'm out!

[Pondlife]

That would be perfect! One flash in the pan, £1m and I'm out!

Try not to get any on Wilmslow's shoes.

[Jog On]

Yeah the first boom/crash was due to everyone thinking this new fangled technology would transform and revolutionise the way we all live – which it has but not in a way anyone could predict – and it will still be very hard to predict how it will continue to develop.

The web is still very young but at least we know more now than we did then. At least now people are doing some more due diligence as to whether a business has a chance of making any money or not.

Back in the initial boom people were going all ga-ga over ‘cool looking’ impressive (expensive, clunky) websites with no focus on how to get traffic.

Now people are all climbing over each other trying to get to the top of the search engines and ‘exploit’ web 2.0 etc. Out of interest I did a search for the term ‘SEO London’ just to see what whoever was winning the rankings for that term was up to. The company at position #1 in Google were all about getting traffic and optimising sites for people.

But when it came to converting visitors into customers they said that a conversion rate of 0.5% (1 in every 200) visitors was acceptable to good. A 0.5% conversion rate in my book is appalling – but who am I to argue with the people who rank #1 in Google for ‘SEO London’

People will soon wake up to the fact that designers and even SEO experts are not sales/marketers and should not have so much of a say on the elements that affect your sales conversions. But right now they’re more concerned with “Get my [professional looking and SEO optimised – but very poorly converting] website to #1 in Google so I can get 1000 visitors a day and make 5 sales…

[PAH]

I'm looking forward to the day when something more reliable that search engines exist to find good websites.

Google and co are ok for finding info from different sources, but crap at giving me a list of websites I can trust and have the products or services that I want. Too much relies on what the user enters as a search term.

So what is going to replace search engines? Properly vetted directories or those built from users recommendations or ratings or actual use?