eBay fired the Skype president for not meeting the company’s financial goal. Is this a sign that there is no hope of building a sustainably profitable business model solely on a membership base? In the meantime, Microsoft bought Jellyfish. Some people linked it to the deals (and possible deals) of DoubleClick, Right Media, and 24/7 Real Media. Same question: Is there any hope of building a solid business model in an area other than with Internet advertisement?

The hope is in the data.

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Two Korean websites won attention on TechCrunch 40 . This reiterates Korea’s arguable status as one of the most active countries outside of the U.S. to participate in the World Wide Web Extravaganza.

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As a new entrant, Voofox builds a surprise by re-shaping the industry order. We call it a remix experience – differing ourselves from the mashup experience that people are seeing in other social sites today. Basically, Voofox thinks of social sites as a platform where people can simply use old language to mingle. There will not be new ideas in Voofox. We’re offering new ways to play with old-fashioned stuff.

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Kris Tate of Zoomr was not the only one. The mainstream media had a run on teen entrepreneurs this month. The Boston Globe reported two success stories; namely Zaid Farooqui, - who started his first business when he was 14 and is now a cofounder of iJigg - and Steven Bao, 15, who has written four Facebook applications. In one of his twits he wrote blatantly: “Steven Bao wants to be a millionaire. Now. And time. And less schoolwork.”

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Many sites are trying hard to get everyone on the Internet involved. As we learned from HitWise’s awakening speech at the Web 2.0 Expo, YouTube has only a 0.16% user upload rate and Flickr only gets 0.2%. With so much effort to bring participation, no wonder these figures brought such a shock. But when we see such figures, we quickly learn one thing – we’ve vastly over-estimated people’s willingness to create their own stuff. In reality (and especially after YouTube’s censorship), we will quickly see categories such as HowTo & DIY start to lose viewers’ interest as the section is now so full of pranks and non-instructional clips.

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Orkut was supposed to get itself a totally new outfit two weeks ago. However, it was something of a disappointment for many users. Why? The new site didn’t change much.

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Italian Social Networking site Dada.net has been continuously expanding its international market. It has successfully developed working versions of its site for 17 countries thus far.

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Joey Alarilla introduced an interesting story in his CNET Asia blog months ago. One of the top Filipino bloggers Yuga (Yuga introduced here) signed a contract with a customer-to-customer bidding site Auction.ph. Upon the signing, Yuga became the top blogger to join the auction site’s “AdAuction” affiliate program. However, compared to other APs, this affiliate program is so specially contracted that it deserves a new name – consulting program.

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On the Net, privacy is the last line of defense. No one dares to touch this topic. Social networking sites such as hi5, Bebo, MySpace include a “Privacy” link at the bottom. They mention clearly and specifically the rights and responsibilities - you can choose to be anonymous; they won’t sell your personal information; they will not collect information from children under 13 and so on. These sites will not allow controversy like what happened with the Ohio ballot exposure to happen in any way.

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