Perry Chen wants to gather a million mini-Medicis on the Web. His site, KickStartr.com, is an online community designed to help artists, musicians, athletes, inventors, and filmmakers raise small sums of money from a large number of patrons to help them fund their projects. A band might upload audio and video of itself, submit a description of expenses for recording an album, and watch the money roll in.

The only catch: Users must set a deadline, ranging from a day to a few months, by which they must raise the entire amount they ask for. If they miss their goal, they don’t get the money. In this way, Chen hopes his site will mimic the urgency of an eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) auction.

At the moment, only a rudimentary site exists, and it draws minimal traffic. But Chen plans to launch the full-fledged site this summer. The revenue model? Some combination that includes advertising, charging a listing fee, taking a tiny percentage of every dollar raised, and offering users upgrades such as a Web analytics package to help fundraisers manage their campaigns.

The founder: Chen, 32, has been a day trader and opened an art gallery and has dabbled in the music business. That last gig led to KickStartr. Frustrated at how hard it was to raise money to pay for two Austrian DJs to come to the U.S., he came up with the notion of soliciting funds online. “There are all sorts of good ideas out there that never have a chance to succeed,” says Chen, who hooked up with Sunny Bates, the founder of an executive search firm who agreed to serve on his advisory board. “He’s worked incredibly hard on this, and he’s got a great sense of timing,” says Bates. “And he comes at it from a real missionary perspective rather than a mercenary perspective.”

The numbers: Chen has raised $200,000 from a group of backers that includes the comedian David Cross. The Arrested Development star has also agreed to raise money for a project of his own via KickStartr to help promote the site. Like many Web 2.0 ventures, the company expects to operate at a loss for at least two years — and its revenue model could generously be described as a work in progress. However, Chen projects revenue of $250,000 in 2008 and $5 million in 2009. If that comes to pass, Chen expects to raise more capital.

The market: KickStartr’s target audience is big. There are five million bands on MySpace alone, and social networking continues to gain steam: 70 percent of teens and 40 percent of adults visit a social networking site at least once a month, according to the research firm eMarketer. Globally, ad spending with social networks is expected to hit $3.8 billion by 2011, although selling ads against the quirky content found on social networks requires some finesse. Peer-to-peer lending is growing fast, too, led by sites like Prosper.com, Richard Branson’s Virgin Money, and the Lending Club. So far, none of these sites let users post audio and video, but that could change. Similarly, YouTube or MySpace could add a fundraising feature, or Facebook’s Causes application could move beyond charity.

Challenges and opportunities: Should KickStartr become a destination website, like eBay, or a company that makes a widget that can be easily placed on other sites, like Slide? It’s an important question. Large sites require promotion and server capacity, which are costly. Widgets are easier to distribute virally, but you give up control of the user and limit your ability to make money selling ads. For now, Chen is hedging his bets. Users will soon be able to add KickStartr widgets to MySpace and Facebook pages, but a central site will still host users’ content.

It’s also worth noting that, in the offline world, only a limited number of people fund the arts, especially at the grass-roots level. Fostering a new level of support for the arts may be KickStartr’s biggest challenge.

“Jackass meets Facebook, only better, much better!”

That’s how Al Gosling describes his latest venture www.exbrag.com. The Chief Executive of the Extreme Group, which now includes a TV channel, theme parks, hotels and cafes, has teamed up with online daring site Bragster to create an “extreme” social networking online experience, where profiled users can dare each other to do crazy things and post up evidence to earn ‘brag bucks’.

You can also log on and challenge Mr Chief Exec himself!

The Internet has become a podium for rants, but Andrew Mason hopes his Web site will spur actions, not just more hot air.

ThePoint.com invites people to create or join a campaign on anything, from winterproofing Chicago with a dome to pressuring Pfizer to cut drug prices in developing countries.

Signing up is free, and site users are not required to follow through on promises to act or contribute money until the campaign has reached what its creator has deemed the “tipping point”—the minimum number of members or funds needed to make a change.

In the case of the Chicago Winter Dome, the tipping point is $10 billion. (So far, $233,085 has been pledged.) Mason, 27, dropped out of the master’s program in public policy at the University of Chicago to start the site last October. He raised $1 million from angel investors and $4.8 million from New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm in Chevy Chase, Md.

The site may soon reach a tipping point of its own: Mason plans to start posting ads.

UKpreneur catches up with the next Alex Tew, Patrick Hankinson as he tries to make $1 million via his website The Social Millionaire.

Can you tell us who you are, your age and a little about your current project?

My name is Patrick Hankinson and I just turned 20 years old. I am a young entrepreneur and have been making a living online for the last couple of years. I recently launched a website called The Social Millionaire. The purpose of this website is to help me raise a million dollars while providing an invaluable service for my advertisers. The money will be used to help some start up companies.

What do you hope to achieve and by when?

I would like to raise $1 million dollars by the end of 2008.

Why do you think you will succeed?

I will succeed with this project because I think it really connects with most mainstream people so it could generate a lot of interest very quickly. The viral components of this website could make it explode.

Talk us through the process you had from idea to actually getting the money in on your website?

I actually came up with the idea a few years ago but it was more along the lines of do it through videos. Then Facebook came along and I thought it would be really cool to execute the same idea through social media websites. After I did some research I found out this idea could really take off so I started putting together the website since I am a web programmer. When it was ready I launched it privately to my newsletter subscribers while writing up my marketing plan. Then executed the marketing plan and am not even close to done.

Have you always been entrepreneurial? Have you had any past failures or successes?

As far as I can remember I have always have tried running some type of company. When I was about 15 I moved into the online world and by 16 I was starting to see a nice income.

I have many failures but nothing where I lost loads of cash. I just lost the time I spent developing the idea. I have had quite a few successful companies which have definitely made it worth it.

Who if any, is your idol, either in the business world or family?

Tough question. There are so many interesting entrepreneurs and creative people out there. Some of my favourite entrepreneurs are Jeff Skoll, KC Irving and Kevin Rose. They have all led very interesting lives and are true entrepreneurs!

Well UKpreneur has seen the rise and fall of many website ventures similar to Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage and time has still yet to show if The Social Millionaire will have the same success, today he has sold $2764.48 worth of advertising. One to watch, definitely, good luck Patrick!

 

START-UP: MIND CANDY (ONLINE GAMES)

Mind Candy is the creation of Michael Acton Smith, 33, who in 1998 set up the e-commerce site Firebox, which now has a turnover of around £11m. ‘Our latest game is Moshi Monsters, which is like an online Tamagotchi. It’s aimed at 7- to 12-year-olds, who can adopt and care for a pet monster,’ says Smith. ‘Children are very technologically adept. They’re going online at four and five years old.’ Mind Candy’s Battersea office has about 20 employees working from an injection of venture capital worth about £5m. ‘We’re not profitable yet, but I’m confident. What’s happening now is fundamentally different to 2000, as there are so many more people online.’ Smith helped found the start-up club Second Chance Tuesday

START-UP: TEXPERTS (QUESTIONS ANSWERED)

Sarah McVittie, 30, and Thomas Roberts, 30, set up the company in 2003 as 82ask, and recently gained investment to give it new life as Texperts. It is based around the text-messaging of questions to experts, who come back with a rapid answer for £1.

It is valued at around £7.4m

BRIGHT STATION VENTURES (PROMOTES START-UPS)

The venture-capital company Bright Station Ventures, which funds and promotes start-up companies, was set up last year by Sháá Wasmund, 36, and Dan Wagner, 44, veterans of the first internet boom. Bright Station is currently backing Miomi (see panel on page 67) and Osoyou, a British shopping-cum-social network site launched last November

START-UP: DOPPLR (TRAVEL CLUB)

Dopplr, which has its headquarters in Helsinki and an office in Shoreditch, London, aims to create a kind of international travel club, with tips and networking shared between high-end travellers. ‘We’re trying to recreate the joy of travel, rather than the queues and grief,’ says Matt Biddulph, 32, who spearheads the UK operation with Matt Jones, 36. The company is funded by a mix of angel investments

START-UP: MOO (BUSINESS CARDS)

Launched in 2006, Moo was dreamt up by Richard Moross, 30, to add new life to the world of business cards. ‘They’re 300-year-old social tools that have survived all kinds of new technologies, and are still useful,’ he says. ‘Even when people have Facebook and several mobile phones, they still scribble down telephone numbers on pieces of paper.’ It’s an e-commerce-type business, but has linked up with Web 2.0 companies such as Flickr, the user-generated photography site, to allow personalised cards to be made. With offices in Clerkenwell, London, Moo has raised capital to about £2.5m. ‘We’ve had orders from many countries,’ says Moross. ‘I’m confident with the model. It is supplying a real business need’

START-UP: MIOMI (ONLINE TIMELINES)

Miomi is a ‘time-browsing’ site that aims to chronicle history by way of user-generated content. ‘It allows you to help create timelines,’ says the CEO, Jonny Crowe, 37. ‘An example might be 9/11. I know someone whose plane was grounded that day at JFK. So they could put an entry on Miomi, and add to the material about that day. We’re aiming to get the world’s memories online,’ he says, ‘so that public history is augmented by private history to become a vast memory bank.’ Miomi arose from the meeting of three German postgraduate students, Thomas Whitfield, Karlheinz Toni and Richard Schreiber. Miomi is supported by Microsoft and funded by Bright Station Ventures. It has offices in Covent Garden

START-UP: PPLPARTY (SOCIAL NETWORKING)

Calum Brannan began PPLparty at the age of 15 on the family PC. Setting up a board for about 5,000 nightclubbers in the Midlands, he started to make £700 a month. ‘It was a hobby that took over,’ says Brannan, now 19. With a bit of funding from an angel investor from London, he moved to an office in Coventry last year and now has five employees — a couple of whom are old enough to be his parents. PPLparty brings clubbers together in a social-network-style format — but recently Calum decided to open it up to anyone looking to network on the web. The site is being reborn as Youmeo.com on April 14

I have just started networking at some of the UK’s dot com networking events that are springing up all over the UK. One of them is the OpenCoffee Club. OpenCoffee Club and is one of a significant handful of meetings for a bounce-back generation of internet entrepreneurs, future technocrats and investors to hook up and share: perchance also for some “VC” – venture capital – to change hands. Here, amid the banquettes and table lamps, it’s as though the dotcom crash of 2000 never happened.

Saul Klein, 37, who set up OpenCoffee Club last February, says the idea came at the right time. “There are now OpenCoffee events in more than 80 locations around the world, which shows the extent of the interest in internet companies.” Klein’s aim is to bring the informal business culture – that go-for-it Californian positivity – of Silicon Valley to the UK. A veteran of various dotcoms, including Lovefilm and Skype, he prefers to see the start-ups as companies rather than just “dotcoms”. “You don’t think of Tesco as a dotcom, do you? But it makes millions from its internet platform.” Last year he set up an entrepreneurs’ forum called Seedcamp, which attracted interest from 274 internet-based companies. Twenty were chosen for the forum, which is likely to become an annual event.

The housing market may be wobbling, the financial industries suffering from the reckless sub-prime lending credit crunch. But the internet is bullish. Commentators are referring to the second web boom and, once again, venture capitalists are circling, seeking to invest in fledgling internet companies – the start-ups. “There has been spectacular growth,” says James Brocket of Calibre One, a head-hunter in the internet sector. “Funding in the UK has gone up considerably. In the first quarter of last year, $24m of VC funding to internet companies was disclosed. In the second quarter, it had risen to $75m.” He adds that this figure is conservative – much more will have gone undisclosed. Fred Destin of Atlas Venture says that, in 2007, £894m was invested in the UK and Ireland by 282 investors. “Perhaps 2008 will be the £1 billion year,” he adds.

The number of British-based start-ups is also hard to gauge: it includes everything from minor-league bloggers hoping to attract a few ads to web applications for bricks-and-mortar companies. But Brocket says that, again, there has been a significant rise in serious start-ups: “In the second quarter of 2007, 58 were started, with 63 in the third quarter. I’m talking about motivated businesses with over $2m behind each of them.”

From the perspective of a British start-up, this presents a real opportunity to get some funding behind them. “There are at least five venture-capital companies investing between $200m and $500m each across Europe, with at least 40% of this going to start-ups in the UK,” says Saul Klein. Add this to the incalculable amounts added by “seed” investors and “angel” investors – smaller investors who often provide the essential early push and who mostly remain private – and it runs into many more millions being spent in Britain. Library House, a research organisation in the technology industries, says that the total disclosed amount of venture capital invested in UK start-ups in 2007 was over £1.4 billion. This is still much less than the dotcom bubble of 2000, which some estimated at about £5 billion, but enough for a consensus to treat it as a “boom”.

If a boom it is, then there’s another vital reason: millions more people have broadband connections. “Broadband penetration is at the tipping point,” says Dan Wagner of Bright Station Ventures, which funds and promotes start-up companies. Wagner, a veteran of the early internet boom, believes there is an unprecedented opportunity for internet start-ups at present, which is why he and his partner, Sháá Wasmund, have set up: “We’re going to spearhead the resurgence.” He also points to the take-up of the internet. “In the first dotcom boom, only around 5% of us had an internet connection,” he says. “Now it’s 50 to 60%.” According to the Office of National Statistics, there are now around 15m households in Britain with internet access – 4m more than in 2002 – and this figure is rising all the time. We are all jumping on the broadband bandwagon.

Facebook, MySpace, eBay, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Bebo, Skype: all have become part of a daily diet for millions of Britons. Then there are the facts from the business pages: that last October Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook; that Dow Jones recently announced that venture capital for internet start-ups had reached almost $1 billion; that global online advertising revenue is projected to rise by 2010 to $55 billion; that Google’s shares were recently valued at over $700. It is clearly a febrile time.

Why now, seven years after the first bubble burst? “Because we’re seeing the reincarnation of the internet,” says the trend analyst Michael Tchong, who envisages an online future rich with possibility – and money. “I think there’s going to be a boom that will make the last boom seem like a day on the beach. It will boggle the imagination.”

Some are more sceptical. Henry Blodget, who runs a web publication called Silicon Alley Insider in New York, featured an article called Recession Watch, which suggested a slowdown was on the cards as advertising and broadband adoption slowed down and competition between dotcoms hotted up. Still, even Blodget acknowledged the industry’s “remarkable resurgence”.

OpenCoffee is not the only networking event. Back in the 1998/99 boom, the First Tuesday networking club put investors together with entrepreneurs. Now one of the key meets is called, referentially, Second Chance Tuesday. “I launched it in 2006, and we were surprised,” says Judith Clegg of the Glasshouse, the company that runs the event. “We have a limit of around 300, and typically have to turn away the same amount again.” These are not the twenty-somethings of dotcom folklore, reckoning on a leap from bedroom to boardroom in six months. “Most are in their thirties and forties,” says Clegg. “People who know what it is to sleep on the office floor. They’re taking big risks. Some are second- and third-generation entrepreneurs. And in my experience, when they get funding they work even harder.” Clegg is excited. “It’s an interesting time. There are some really exciting start-ups.” Are there duff ideas? She laughs. “Yes. But they’re obviously high-risk. Their overall quality is excellent.” Indeed, to add to the feelings of dotcom déjà vu, First Tuesday has returned to the fray.

Much of the new interest in the internet has gathered around the notion of Web 2.0. This, the notional upgrade from the first internet boom – Web 1.0, which focused on e-commerce, or selling over the internet – is characterised by “user-generated content”: its pages filled with the words, photographs and films of the internet-using public. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo are typical Web 2.0 applications, seething with the jottings and photographs of its youthful diarists.

Since Web 2.0 came into parlance in 2003, the internet has become a mass habit. “The digital lifestyle has come to pass,” says Tchong. “It’s the marriage of man and machine. We are becoming computers, and computers are becoming us.” Son on Bebo, daughter on Facebook, Mum ordering food on Ocado, Dad blogging about golf: the British home has taken to the digital superhighway, and the predictions attributed to Bill Gates when he started Microsoft in 1975 – that there would be a computer in every home and every child would be computer-literate – have come to pass. “The interest is extraordinary,” says Matt Biddulph, 31, of the travel start-up Dopplr. “So many people use social-networking sites. It’s particularly true of middle-class affluent London.” The young, in particular, are naturalised to this dynamic information world. “The internet is no longer a weird thing you do in Dad’s study. It’s something you do on the bus.” Since the internet bubble of 2000, a generation has emerged for whom the internet has been an integral part of their adult lives. “I’m 33 and I’m not a ‘digital native’,” says Wayne Arnold of the internet-marketing firm Profero, using the term for someone who has grown up with digital technology. “But the under-25s use MySpace and Facebook as normally as a telephone – it’s just what they do. We may refer to the internet as ‘new technology’; they don’t.”

Globally, the figures are huge. As Tchong says: “MySpace has a population approaching that of Brazil.” Facebook claims 64m users. There are well over 100m blogs. “It’s a huge, driving force,” adds Tchong. “It’s a fundamental shift in the way we relate to each other. It goes way beyond online advertising. It’s social capital.” So, the new internet user is not just e-shopping at eBay and Amazon: that’s so Web 1.0. They’re socialising, sharing opinions, getting entertained – all online. “They’re moving away from print,” says Tchong. “They’re moving away from TV. The market is screaming for a new business model for these social-engagement products.” Soon, he says, they’ll be so important that would-be employees will use a Facebook page instead of a CV. “If you’re not online you might as well be watching black-and-white TV.” The internet is also remarkable for the marketing opportunities it offers and, as Richard Moross of the British start-up Moo puts it, “TV does not know who you are.” The internet does: it has followed your browsing patterns, your tastes and preferences – even your politics, should you be using Facebook. This is powerful information to advertisers.

Some of the big names of the first boom have returned, including Brent Hoberman, an architect of the UK end of Web 1.0 and the one responsible, along with Martha Lane Fox, for Lastminute.com, perhaps the most famous first-wave Brit dotcom, which took the travel industry’s “bucket shop” and put it on the internet. The technology – and Lane Fox – lent it vital glamour. Hoberman went on to help found a site called Wayn, a social-networking site for travellers standing for Where Are You Now?, of which he remains a non-executive director, and he has a new start-up, Mydeco, a home-decoration site. “I think London is the best place to be an internet entrepreneur right now. Yes, the people and the office spaces are expensive, but there’s a vibrant network, good infrastructure – and the UK knows how to do creative industries.”

So the venture capitalists are converging on London, their names whispered in the networking clubs: Index Ventures, Accel, Atlas Venture. “Money is coming from a number of sources,” says Ze’ev Rozov of Sportingo, a start-up that brokers sports content. “US VCs have opened offices here, and they’re making investments in start-ups in England.” Rozov, who has worked across the world, thinks conditions in the UK are “ripe”. Some go further. “London has become the Silicon Valley of Europe,” says Eric Baker of Viagogo, a ticket-reselling site that launched in 2006 with a $20m injection – gained precisely because of the London factor. Indeed, Biddulph has noticed “there’s a lot of money and sometimes not quite enough to spend it on.”

Another factor fuelling the boom is that it’s far cheaper to set up a company now. “Lastminute used to cost millions of pounds every year in technology,” says Hoberman. “Now it is far cheaper.” How come? “Moore’s Law. Everything becomes cheaper and faster.” Can you set up for £20,000? “Absolutely,” says Clegg. “Less, perhaps.” Publicity and marketing is virtually free using social networks and blogs: “So, the only real expense is employees and office space,” says Biddulph. And sometimes you don’t even need that. I met Biddulph in a Shoreditch cafe where, at 11am on a Monday, almost everyone was using a laptop. “I can run the company from here,” he says, dressed in the geek chic of black T-shirt and trimmed beard. “It’s being called the ‘Bedouin office’.” Whether in San Francisco, Boston or Amsterdam, the company can travel with you.

In the 1990s, the dotcom crowd was characterised as young, fresh, exciting. Armed with a new lexicon – “functionality”, “content”, “monetising” – they offered the “soft launches” of their dotcoms and hoped for an early IPO, the Initial Public Offering that would be the first sale of private stock to the public. “It’s different now,” says Hoberman. “The acquisition market is stronger than the IPO market.” Indeed, anyone who “starts with the idea that they’re going to sell shares is starting at the wrong place”. This boom is more substantial, adds Hoberman; less feverish, more sustainable, with increasingly mature participants who are often armed with prior experience. “We saw a generation of talent that was blooded in 2000,” says Saul Klein. “Those survivors are gold dust.”

Another thing about the Web 1.0 bubble was that everyone was being valued as a winner, says Wagner. “Now there’s more reality in the market. Not everyone is going to win big. Some will fail. But this time it’s an intelligent boom.” Everyone remembers the disasters, such as Boo.com, the online fashion retailer that went bust in 2000 after ploughing through almost £80m. They recall the Aeron chairs that littered Brick Lane’s second-hand shops as companies flogged their assets.

But such stories shouldn’t render the dotcom idea unworthy. “The reality is that the internet, including e-commerce, has surpassed all expectations,” says Dan Wagner. “Forecasts for growth have been dwarfed. Google is now worth over $130 billion. The boom is happening, and this time it’s sustainable.” And what if some fail? “Any new industry features ideas that are ahead of its time. Some may be misguided, off the wall or ‘blue-sky’, unrooted in economic reality,” says Wagner. “You’ve got to see failure for what it is –a risk that someone took that could have resulted in an exciting venture that created wealth and jobs.” And many of the early dotcoms did survive. “We started with £500 in a garage,” says Wayne Arnold. “Now we’ve got offices all over the world, clients like Puma and the government, and a turnover of over £5.5m.”

Ah, yes: surely the government is excited by silicon Britain? Yes, says Alex Butler, transformational strategy director at the Central Office of Information, responsible for online policy. Her department has noted the Facebook effect, and is transferring it to political life. “We’re moving to Web 2.0 applications as a trusted source,” says Butler. “We’ve got to ‘fish where the fish are’, as we say.” The result will be “supersites” that meld, for instance, Ofsted reports with local house prices and online educational chat.

Will this boom bring a bust? Some think so, and the term “Bubble 2.0” is gaining prevalence from a sceptical commentariat that recalls the dotcom fallout and recoils from the overvaluations. They cite the internet entrepreneur Niklas Zennström, who sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion, then stepped down in October after it was acknowledged that this was an overvaluation. Add these wild projections to a marketplace pullulating with start-ups and you’ve got the ingredients of a bust.

Facebook exemplifies the current web bubble, thinks Andrew Keen, the chief sceptic about Web 2.0 and author of the recent jeremiad The Cult of the Amateur. “In my view, Facebook will be the pin-up for the bust,” says Keen. “Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook’s founder] is too young to have been around the first time, and it’s hard to take Facebook seriously when industry people are valuing it at $10 to $15 billion.” Social networking has fuelled a hectic, unsustainable market, he believes, and Silicon Valley is too unselfcritical to see it. “The Valley start-ups are in big dollars, and ridiculous valuations have ensued,” adds Keen. “I get called a Luddite, but in private a lot of people agree with me.” With lots of social networking sites all seeking advertising money, some kind of shake-out is due.

As to the claims of the web visionaries that the web would democratise public life, making everyone a published author, artist or photographer: well, Keen is not keen. “Democratisation is making a few people incredibly rich. And the little old lady with the pension [VCs often use endowment funds] is the one losing the money.”

So, will there be a bust? “No,” says Biddulph, packing his laptop. “The most there’ll be is a soft landing.” After all, as Klein says, “Over a billion people use the internet and that number is rising.” As to all these online hordes, chattering, blogging, putting their holiday snaps on Flickr and poking each other on Facebook, their value has yet to be ascertained.

I came across this article about a web 2.0 from back in 2007and thought what a great idea it was, but can’t seem to find out what has happened?

The story:

When Oxford student Thomas Whitfield put forward his idea in the university’s own version of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, he hoped for nothing more than encouraging words and a slice of the £5,000 prize money.

But the judges, which included two former Internet millionaires, were so “blown away” by it they threw the weight of their £50 million investment fund behind him.

Now Mr Whitfield, 25, a PhD biochemistry student at Christ Church college, and two friends plan to turn the website, conceived during a night out drinking, into the next YouTube.

If all goes to plan it should make them multi-millionaires by the time they are 30.

The final year student and his friend Karl Heinz Toni, 25, a computer science graduate, came up with designthetime.com while drinking in the lobby of a hotel they were staying in during a residential course.

They quickly recruited a third friend Richard Schreiber, 25.

It involves creating a website featuring a virtual timeline stretching back into history and far into the future. The “online timeline” will be split into minutes, each of which can be bought by users to post memorable moments in their lives.

Users can then buy their place in history or the future.

The more you pay the more prominent your entry will be for a particular minute.

The idea is similar to the Million Dollar Homepage in which a student sold off one million pixels of a computer picture at $1 a time.

When the pixel was clicked on the person or company’s work was displayed.

Mr Whitfield, 25, who is originally from Germany, said: “We were very confident about our idea but we never thought anything like this would happen.

The prototype of the website can be viewed on www.designthetime.com but its dead! Any ideas?

Well i was quite late in signing up to Facebook. I have no Myspace page and didn’t want to join any social networks for the very reason of i don’t have enough time and i knew if i joined i would be addicted to it – and i was right!

I joined yesterday, i already have 19 friends with more requests going in by the hour! I find somebody i know, view their friends, find another and another and before you know it, I’m sat there for 3 hours typing in ex girlfriends names and ex colleagues etc that i have lost touch with.

I really do love it! I’m still getting used to all the widgets which my friends use such as avatars, buying people drinks and loads more. And its these widgets that are now making people millionaires …

Unlike most recent college grads, Joe Aigboboh does not have a Facebook account. But Aigboboh, 22, and his business partner, Jesse Tevelow, 24, are now among the world’s reigning experts on the Facebook platform, thanks to the popularity of one Facebook application, called Sticky Notes, that took Aigboboh less than a week to write.

They set up shop here, in the freshly painted basement of a dilapidated West Philly row house, a few weeks ago. Almost daily they get calls from Facebook-frenzied companies scrambling to stake their claim on the platform, offering them paid consulting gigs, development projects, full-time jobs.

But now that their four-month-old company, J-Squared Media, is pulling in $45,000 a month in advertising revenues from Facebook, they’ve decided to focus on building their own applications instead.

Last month a privately held media company made a formal acquisition offer worth more than $3 million; following in the footsteps of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, J-Squared turned it down. One reason? Becoming two more anonymous product managers didn’t hold much appeal—not if they could do something bigger.

A new class of startups is emerging that is part blogging, part genealogy and part something unique. They are focused on the very long term – getting and then keeping customers for decades, and encouraging friends and especially family members to join, too. Once they’re hooked, they’ve spent so much time building content that they are very unlikely to ever leave.

The three startups we’re tracking are Our Story, Story Of My Life and My Family. And while these sites are not purely genealogy/family tree focused, they overlap extensively with other startups we cover regularly such as Geni and My Heritage which focus first on building out the family tree first and adding content second.

Goes to show there is still a lot that can be done with social networking online.

The search for business contacts is fast moving online. Social networks — long the domain of youngsters interacting with their friends — are increasingly attracting the corporate set on the hunt for sales leads, new hires, new jobs, vendors, contractors and other contacts.

For business users, the most popular site these days is LinkedIn, which boasts more than 13 million active members, up from 8.5 million last year. Among other, albeit much smaller, networks are ones run by Orkut, Ryze, Tribe.net and Spoke. Facebook, the iconic popular network for students, is also now full of specialized business networks.

Consider setting up your own company networking site, providing an easy way for your employees to present ideas, for customers to check out and comment on your products and services and for vendors to seek your business, among other things. Firms can create their own networks using the online service Ning or their own in-house software.