Startup and Entrepreneur News

ATLANTA — Hundreds of young Atlanta women are signed up on a Web site that some critics are calling total exploitation. The founders call it free enterprise. And just about everyone Channel 2 showed it to called it shocking. It’s called MyFreeImplants.com and it’s a donation site for young women who want free breast implants. But it’s what they do to get the big money that’s troubling for some.

“Everyone uses sex to sell. That’s what this really is. It’s marketing and this is America,” said MyFreeImplants.com founder Jay Moore.

MyFreeImplants.com is a business venture hatched at a bachelor party in Las Vegas to help young women raise thousands of dollars for breast augmentation surgery through online donors.

The Web site has taken off. Five-thousand women are now signed up. One woman took her bid for new breasts to YouTube.

The surgery isn’t cheap. It’s usually $4,000 for silicon implants and $5,000 for saline. The money is held in an account until the goal is reached and then sent directly to the surgeon selected.

But it’s how the women get the donations that is raising some people’s eyebrows.

Read Whole Article http://www.wsbtv.com/news/16061686/detail.html

Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs.  In the post, ”February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce.  Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas’ initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million. 

For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.

On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar.  Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision.  See ”Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more. 

The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers?  On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out).  On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.

http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/twenty-years-later-no-longer-just-a-hobby/

Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).

Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.

“You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/technology/23howto.html?em&ex=1209441600&en=feb7bd02817e4a02&ei=5087%0A

When Chris Clark bought Pizza.com for $20 in the mid-1990s, he never expected that almost 15 years later, the seemingly benign domain name would sell for $2.6 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041602014.html

Sean Stafford was a support representative at Louisville-based Modern Gigabyte when his idea led to the founding of the domain name platform company DNZoom (Domain Name Zoom) in June 2007.

He is now director of product development for DNZoom, which was acquired on Feb. 18 by the Delray Beach Fla.-based online bidding site BIDO.

He is an investor in LouisvilleVP (venture partners), which was founded last month. The company is developing a new music platform, Band.org, which will link bands and musicians with musical enthusiasts.

Stafford’s book, “Domain Graduate: Tapping the Online Mines,” was launched in electronic form on Jan. 15. It sells for $87 at www.domaingraduate.com.

The book has made Stafford something of a cyber-world celebrity in Australia and Europe, and he is a sought-after domain name speaker there.

Web companies Sedo.com and Fabulous.com use Domain Graduate to train their new employees. An expanded version is to be published in book form by early 2009.

http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/04/07/story13.html?b=1207540800^1615444

THE e-commerce bandwagon bypassed millions of carpenters, massage therapists, lawyers and other service providers, mostly because it is impossible to drop an appointment into a shopping cart without unleashing a scheduling nightmare.

Now that a set of Internet start-up companies has emerged to help solve this problem, though, small businesses could start using the Web as more than just an online brochure. And while the category is too new for analysts to handicap with much confidence, there are signs it could gain a significant following.

“This is something that’s been needed for a while, but no one has been able to do it successfully,” said Greg Sterling, of Sterling Marketplace Intelligence, an online consultancy. “With these new services, there are a lot of circumstances where it can work quite well for both the business and the consumer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/technology/31ecom.html?ref=smallbusiness