Well, it turned out that perhaps I was too cynical. On Friday morning, I posted the Labor Day Bad News Poll, pointing out that companies often buried bad news after markets closed on a Friday—and asking readers to predict what type of bad news they expected, if any, on the extra slow Friday before Labor Day, when hardly anyone is left around to see the aforementioned bad news.

In focusing on companies, I forgot about Uncle Sam (read on).

I presented my top predictions: major layoff, CEO ouster, and a lawsuit loss or otherwise bad news about a lawsuit. I also offered readers the choice of saying I was too cynical—that nothing too bad would happen this past Friday given all the bad news out there recently. And finally, I had a fifth option—for readers to write in with their own ideas of what bad news might be announced.

I shut off the voting at 4pm on Friday, when markets closed, and promised an update this week. So here we are:

The good news, I guess, is that nothing big seems to have come after the markets closed last week. Nothing I spotted, anyway-which could of course mean PR folks were successful at burying it!

As for our reader choices, the most popular vote—made by 40 percent of those taking the poll—was for major downsizing. (Wow, that is cynical—the idea a company would lay off a bunch of workers before Labor Day and try to bury it.) Next in line, in a dead heat with 18 percent of the vote each, were CEO ouster and major lawsuit. Only 7 percent thought I was too cynical, which it looks like I was: score one for the optimists.

But none of this means there wasn’t some big bad business/economic news last Friday. As one reader commented and another wrote in, the government released some truly dismal jobs news on Friday that showed no net new jobs were added in the U.S. in August—the worst showing in 11 months.

Technically, this jobs news was released before markets closed, so doesn’t qualify as being buried. But it sure does qualify as bad.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Any savvy news hound knows that companies love to bury bad news by disclosing it after the close of markets on a Friday. The Friday before a long weekend like Labor Day is especially attractive.

That got me wondering what bad news might be coming today. Is there another big CEO shuffle looming, a la Apple and Steve Jobs (which of course they recognized was far too big to bury)? A major layoff or lawsuit loss perhaps?

Or have we had enough bad news as an economic whole that everyone—even the PR moles—will take this Friday off?

Since there’s wisdom in crowds, I figured why not have a little fun and set up a survey to see what readers think? I’ve included my top choices below, but also left room for you to point out something else. This poll shuts down at 4pm EST on Friday, when the markets close.

I’ll announce the results next week. Have a great long weekend–with only good news!

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s always good to hear about another small Seattle startup that’s bootstrapped and already profitable. Yesterday it was Appature, today it’s AppBank. They may share the first three letters of their names (and bootstrapped profitability), but after that they’re about as different as two Internet software companies can be.

AppBank is a six-person company focused on developing software to help Facebook users create social entertainment applications—and get paid for them. The company is rolling out the public beta version of its site today. The world of Facebook apps is very crowded, of course, but what AppBank is trying to do is give average Facebook users easier ways to make simple apps like quizzes, surveys, and games in their spare time, and more effective ways to make money from them by providing targeted advertising. “It’s the first time a company has paired relevant ads with crowdsourced social entertainment,” says Fred Hsu, AppBank’s founder and CEO.

Hsu started the company in April of this year, together with chief operating officer Joyce Chang. Hsu is the co-founder of Oversee.net, a Los Angeles company that holds Internet domain names and does domain marketing for the search, display, and lead-generation industries. Oversee did $200 million in revenue last year, and Hsu sold a minority stake in the company to private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners for $150 million. Chang, for her part, came from Seattle-based Tracento, which implements Facebook applications like Friend Hugs, Kisses, and Send Flowers. Both UCLA computer science grads, Hsu and Chang are based in Seattle, and the rest of the company’s employees are in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

What AppBank offers is a quick way to create a Facebook quiz, for example—”What type of underwear are you?” or “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or some such—and then free tools to … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

Are you smarter than Paris Hilton? If you could know the exact time, date, and location of your death, would you want to know? Which Harry Potter character are you? If you could only have one home gaming system for the rest of your life, which one would you pick?

It wouldn’t be hard to spend your whole day responding to online polls focused on burning questions like these. Indeed, answering the polls, surveys, and quizzes that have spread across sites like MySpace and Facebook is one of the most popular pastimes on the Internet. But quick—can you name the company that provides the technology behind most of these Web-based polls and quizzes? Don’t worry if you can’t. It’s a low-profile startup in Watertown, MA, called Pangea Media.

Named after the massive proto-continent that began to break apart 250 million years ago, Pangea is far better known through its network of Web properties, including Quibblo, Quiz Rocket, and SnapPoll, which together serve up more than 50 million quizzes and polls a year. These sites contain hundreds of quizzes built by Pangea, but they also bring in traffic by letting users design their own quizzes, which they can then embed in their blogs or social-networking profiles for their friends to try.

The company also has a lucrative business creating specialized polls and quizzes for advertisers around their brands. Instead of a regular banner ad for a BMW, for example, imagine an ad with a quiz offering the chance to find out “What model of BMW are you?”

These “adverquizzes,” as Pangea founder and CEO Seth Lieberman calls them, try to turn advertising from an annoyance into a form of entertainment. They earn higher rates than typical display ads, and their yield for advertisers goes beyond simple exposure—the adverquizzes also bring in e-mail addresses and other information that companies can use to build relationships with individual consumers down the road. Some adverquizzes are also customizable, meaning users can mix their own content in with the branding message and embed the new material on their own sites or profiles.

“Quizzes are actually an amazing framework for engagement and connectivity between advertisers and users,” Lieberman told me during a recent visit to Xconomy’s offices. “They’re highly engaging. They’re part self-discovery and part entertainment, and they’re highly viral.”

Lieberman says that after his success with Focalex, a Boston-based e-mail marketing and lead generation company that he sold to Intermix Media (then the parent company of MySpace) for $4 million in 2004, he wanted to try building a content-oriented Web 2.0 company. But it had to be something that would scale up naturally, with a large market, and that wouldn’t take a whole lot of capital to get underway. “We really wanted a model that was content-rich, but content-agnostic—we didn’t care whether it was focused on health or parenting or careers or casual entertainment,” Lieberman says. “That’s why we liked quizzes, because they can be written about anything.”

The company concentrated on building a single quiz platform, called QuizEngine, that would be able to handle everything from quiz creation to quiz taking to advertising and the Flash-based widgets that quiz builders can embed in their own sites. (For an example of a Quibblo widget, see the quiz at the end of this story.) The whole service is hosted at Pangea’s site QuizEngine.com. “Running it all off of the same code base, the same technology, is the only way to scale multiple sites and make it manageable,” says Lieberman. “That’s one of the things I learned at Intermix—they made a lot of acquisitions, and you can’t effectively run seven sites on Python and three on PERL and six on Ruby.”

Lieberman says Pangea has “a very West Coast mentality” about the content of its websites—most content creation is left to users, for example—but “a very Northeast mentality” about revenue and money. In other words, it wouldn’t have rolled out its free quiz creation tools without having a plan for monetizing QuizEngine through the branded adverquizzes—such as a quiz last year that invited users to see which cast member from the MTV musical film American Mall they most resembled, or … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Yes, we are biased—we admit it. But, hey, six months of dealing with Verizon customer service agents who can’t get your order straight, keep losing records of your calls, erroneously cut off your service (and then charge you to have it turned back on)—and are snarly about the whole thing to boot—kind of makes you lose your objectivity. And that was after the Verizon installation guy spent a couple hours on his cell phone and billed us for the full time he was in our offices supposedly working. So we decided to check in with our readers—and fellow entrepreneurs—to gauge their point of view. Maybe our experience, after all, was the exception.

We crafted a poll (see the bottom right corner of the site) that asked readers for their view on the hardest thing about launching a business, cleverly concealing the true intent of our survey by listing “Dealing with Verizon’s ‘customer service’” as just one of the choices, along with other basics: raising funding, hiring core workers, finding customers, and IP protection.

And guess what? For a week, Verizon was at the top of the results, with more than 50 percent of the vote. And while, admittedly, fewer votes have been cast in the poll than in the New Hampshire primaries, Verizon is still surprisingly high up the ladder–in a three-way tie for second place with “raising funding” and “hiring the core team,” all at 23 percent of the votes, and just a hair behind first-place “finding the first customers,” which has garnered 26 percent of votes cast.

Think about this: successfully installing and managing phone and Internet is as hard for entrepreneurs as raising venture capital and finding core customers—and it’s harder than acquiring key technology. Does this mean the folks over at Harvard Business School and the Sloan School of Management need to be thinking about a new entrepreneurial seminar? Have their curricula overlooked this fundamental aspect of starting a business?

Of course, the returns aren’t all in, and Verizon might plummet to the bottom of the list as more votes stream in. But geez, Verizon, this has got to tell you something.

Hello, Verizon?

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s featured on Amazon’s home page, and the star-power testimony behind it runs from Toni Morrison to Michael Lewis. But is Amazon’s new e-book reader, Kindle, produced with Cambridge company E Ink’s “electronic paper” technology, a winner? Will it really transform the way people consume literature? At $399 for the reader and $9.99 a book, Xconomy’s Wade Roush says it falls short of the mark.

With the holiday shopping season officially underway, and the staff reeling from over-consumption, we couldn’t resist putting up a poll to find out how readers feel. The choices are: “stick with paper,” “wait for a big price drop,” “and buy it now.” The early returns favor paper. But we’d like to hear from more of you. You can find the poll on the lower right portion of all Xconomy pages.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Last week, in our usual understated fashion, we here at Xconomy launched a new poll widget. It’s just another in a growing line of features—such as our recent podcasts and News Xpress offerings—that we like to drop into the site to hopefully engage and inform our readers (News Xpress is taking off, but I think we’re still waiting for someone to actually listen to one of our stories).

But back to our poll. We started with a simple question: If you had $10 million to invest in a New England growth cluster, what would you chose (in alphabetical order): biotechnology, clean energy, mobile, robotics, or Web 2.0. And you resoundingly answered (both of you—well, we actually got a fair number of responses) clean energy. A bit over half the votes (51 percent) went to this field, easily trouncing biotech (14 percent), Web 2.0 (14 percent), robotics (12 percent), and mobile (a scant 9 percent).

Which got me thinking…My own gut reaction is that our readers have it wrong. Given the incredible hype around cleantech, and the unknown time to fruition of many of these technologies, there is no way I would sink my precious $10 million in that field. In fact, my own fledgling theory, let’s call it a hypothesis, is that you would do much better if you flopped our survey results completely on their head. Your best payoffs would come first in mobile, then robotics, Web 2.0, biotech, and, lastly, clean energy.

That’s it—I have nothing else to say right now. We’re going to keep the poll up a while longer, both to see if my astute observations change the voting pattern (and also to give us time to think of another question). And if you’ve got a question you’d like to put to your fellow readers, please send it in to editors@xconomy.com.

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share: