GigaOM

Many entrepreneurs fear being a flash-in-the-pan success — achieving an exit once, but never again. (Some might call this being lucky rather than good.) But while the allure of success inspires us to do great things, achieving it can have an ugly aftereffect: complacency. Vigilance, my friends, is the only path to serial-founder bliss. Here, in descending order, I offer nine leading indicators that you’re headed for one-hit wonderdom.

9. You went and got all tricked out.
I mean with your next business, not your fashion sense. But remember how you got your first hit — with a kindergarten-level UI that any neophyte could comprehend. Sure your friends called you Forrest Gump and sneered that you were lucky; that’s their problem. Trying to prove to your friends that you’re really, truly smart isn’t good business. Delivering a simple, usable concept that solves problems and makes money is. Continue »

Mippin (formerly Refresh Mobile), whose browser-based site presents content specially designed for mobile consumption, says it has named a new CEO and reached a milestone of 500,000 users. But I question its ability to survive.

The London-based startup’s service also learns what users like and recommends stories based on their previous interests. I call it a mobile portal analogous to Yahoo, MSN, Netvibes or PageFlakes, but Judy Gibbons, the new CEO, has a different definition. She says it’s a mobile media services company, in that it optimizes PC content for consumption on a mobile device. “We believe there is only one Internet - there is not a separate mobile one,” Gibbons told me via email. “But mobile presents different challenges and opportunities and there is real user value to having all this content in one place in the same consistent format with a great fast user experience.”

Whatever you call it, Mippin needs to gain wide adoption in a crowded area to support its advertising-based revenue model. Continue »

Remember back in the Dark Ages before text messaging, when a teenager (let’s call him Jerry Yang) might get a best friend (maybe call him Carl Icahn) to call another friend (say, Steve Ballmer) using three-way calling? With Yang sitting silently on the line, the goal would be for Icahn to goad Ballmer into saying how he really felt about Yang. Well, now that we’re adults, and billions of dollars are on the line, all this is done via proxy battles as is the case with the aborted deal for Microsoft, headed by Ballmer, to buy Yahoo, which is headed by Yang.

The whole thing just gets more and more dramatic — the lack of teen girls notwithstanding. Today, Carl Icahn, who holds a large stake in Yahoo, released a letter to Yahoo shareholders where he says he has spent, like, HOURS on the phone with Ballmer, who was still totally interested in Yahoo. But Ballmer’s, like, so worried that Yang and current Yahoo management might “mismanage” the company during the time it takes to get a deal done (because The Federal Trade Commission can take FOREVER, ya know?) Continue »

You know the joke about Microsoft — they normally get things almost right on the third try. After failing miserably to get Yahoo in two initial attempts thus far, Steve Ballmer and Co. might be returning for yet another try, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, two weeks ago, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to suggest they meet to discuss a new idea involving other partners, according to a person familiar with the matter…Yahoo remains skeptical about the viability of a deal that would break out its core search business. But the company remains open to discussing any proposal from Microsoft, people close to the company said.

This time they are looking to team up with News Corp. and Time Warner and bid for Yahoo, and essentially carve it up. That said, the whole story is full of caveats. Continue »

Last week, OStatic noted the rumor, first reported by VentureBeat, that Microsoft intended to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset for $100 million. Lo and behold, Microsoft and Powerset are confirming today that an acquisition agreement has been signed. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the rumored $100 million figure was in line with valuations put on Powerset based on its early financing.

Powerset’s search technology uses the open-source, cluster-based technology Hadoop, which provides fast answers to queries by using the resources of many computers. Hadoop, a project from the Apache Software Foundation, is also behind Yahoo’s search.

Natural language search got a bad rap early on in the rise of the web as players such as AskJeeves stumbled, but clustered query technology like Hadoop’s may represent a game-changer. Microsoft, of course, has been desperately trying to catch up in search, where it is a distant third to Google and Yahoo. It won’t be surprising to see large portions of Microsoft’s LiveSearch start to depend on Powerset, and in so doing, depend on open-source upstart Hadoop.