Happy birthday from the whole staff! It was nice to have you recently here in Kazan and hope you arrive on time enough to be able to celebrate a birthday with family! Hapy birthday!!!

I had lunch with a friend and mentor on Monday. Christopher Skinner founded MakeBuzz, a very successful online business strategy consultancy. He’s had a lot of success building a service business, he is from New Orleans, and has an office in New York too. He has built online marketing integration strategies for clients like United Airlines and other big companies with gross revenue above $20 billion.

I asked how he has grown his business and been successful bringing on board those BIG clients, the whales that we all want to be working for?

Perseverance, perception of the client problem and make due dates. Something like that. You have to absorb yourself into the client’s needs, not yours. I basically have few friends, no hobbies, I stay close to my family and stay focused. Lots of self denial. I don’t think any of this is extreme. I am not that studious. As Geddy Lee says, ‘we are not that smart and can’t figure out anything better to do’.

There you go. Life inside of one paragraph. No different than anyone else that tries.

I appreciate his response, basically Christopher boils it down to focus and drive. Decide where you want your business to be, and do what it takes to get it there, without getting distracted by the unimportant. Thanks, have a great summer in Europe!

OK, someone has to put an end to the misery. Web 2.0 has officially derivatived itself to death or at least relegated itself to a niche of a niche. I’m sure there have been proclimations elsewhere, but today I’m finished with Web 2.0.

I’ve been feeling this coming on for a while. Web 2.0 startups are falling over each other to appeal to the geekiest of the geeks. I have the tools I use daily, but I no longer get excited at the lastest greatest aggregator of social networks that I don’t even use.

Alex Muse explained the derivative nature of Web 2.0 social apps today in his post about why he doesn’t blog about Web 2.0 anymore:

Get this, you have a bunch of social tools you use: twitter, blogs, flickr, bebo, delicious, digg, linkedin, upcoming, youtube, pownce, disqus and so on. You want your friends to be able to follow your various feeds in one single place so you sign up for FriendFeed. FriendFeed enables you to share your stuff with others and enables you to consume your friend’s stuff all in one place. Get it? You have all these tools that generate XML feeds of your activity. FriendFeed gobbles the feeds and displays your activity in one place. Very few people I know (in the real world) have time to keep up a blog, much less any of the other social tools listed above. So the market for FriendFeed is relatively small. Now, back to Jason’s post on FriendFeedLinks. This application takes topics discussed on FriendFeed and organizes them based on popularity and is basically a meme tracker. Get it? This is an application for an application for another application and so on. I can’t keep up!

What has gotten lost in all of the chatter about Web 2.0 is the need for a solid business model. Jason Fried explained the importance of a real revenue model in his post titled Start a Business, Not a Startup.

Suggesting startups — specifically tech startups — don’t need to look for revenue opportunities now is akin to spoiling a child and shielding them from the outside world: They’re far less prepared when they eventually have to leave the house for the first time.

We’re focused on the same thing here at Voodoo Ventures. Flatsourcing, our current focus is a service business in which we are packaging outsourced web development services into simple products that integrate well into a variety of organizations. siteMighty has always had a freemium revenue model and interestingly, the most productive revenue stream is from users who pay us for the software.