ZocDoc, the service for finding doctors and making appointments online, is announcing two new high profile investors this morning: Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. The investments follow news last month that the company had raised a $3 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.

The company, which launched about a year ago, is touting some impressive growth numbers in its announcement, writing “ZocDoc offered patients nearly 20,000 available appointments in September, a 2,000% increase since the company launched a year ago. The company has grown its consumer and practitioner base by an average of 50% per month as it continues to add new specialties and extend its geographic reach.”

Currently, the company’s service is only offered in the New York City area, though earlier this year they announced plans to expand to Washington DC and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, for Bezos, the investment in ZocDoc marks yet another addition to his Web 2.0 portfolio. It was recently revealed that the billionaire backed Twitter, while prior investments include 37Signals, Kongregate, and ChaCha.

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“Extraordinary. Incredible. Tremendous. Amazing. Unprecedented. Extraordinary (again). Great. Revolutionary. Great. Extraordinary (yes, again). Unbelievable.” All these words Steve Jobs used to describe the ultra-thin MacBook Air during yesterday’s Macworld keynote. And all without any apparent regard to how that makes laptops which aren’t so thin as the MacBook Air feel. Instead, it takes this brave video from YouTube auteur Kevin Nalts to expose the truth.

Source:Valleywag

Oracle has acquired BEA for $8.5 billion. Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. These events are not coincidence. Oracle, which already makes a database, wants to add BEA’s software on top of that database. Sun, which makes application servers and other software which connects to databases, wants to slip MySQL in underneath that layer. It all adds up to what geeks and software salesmen call a “stack,” or a complete package of interconnecting programs.

The irony is that BEA rose to prominence on the notion that its application server would make things simpler for database buyers. Buy any database you’d like, and BEA’s application server would connect to it. Likewise, MySQL grew as a cheaper, open-source alternative to databases from IBM and Oracle.

A database here, an application server there, a bit of open-source software on top of that all sounds nice in theory. It proved in practice to be a headache for the influential tech buyers at large corporations. One salesperson calling on them, one phone number to dial when things went wrong, it turns out, is what they really wanted.

The consolidation was inevitable, if perhaps a bit sad. The goal of the stack game is to make sure that your software is the layer on top — the one that matters to programmers, the one applications are designed for. BEA and MySQL both had grand ambitions in that regard. Those are now coming to an end. Sun and Oracle will no doubt make grand statements about how compatible their software is, how well their children play with others. Ignore those. The history of IT tells us those promises are false.

Source:Valleywag

Remember the comparisons between Amazon’s Kindle and the iPod? Don’t try them on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday’s Macworld keynote. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Mmhmm, Mr. Jobs. And whose fault is that?

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Source:Valleywag

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron’s spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller’s IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has “few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S.” What does that mean?

It means that Diller, who prides himself on spreading his bets, has done a bad job. The company’s diversification into all fields of Internet business has proven a weakness rather than a strength — a fact even Diller now recognizes. That’s why he’s breaking the company up into bits, leaving an IAC that’s focused on online content and advertising. The remainder, however, will still be too vulnerable to the U.S. economy.

Bezos, meanwhile, has proved the opposite of Diller. He’s made one bet and stuck to it. And while e-commerce is no longer sexy on Sand Hill Road or on Wall Street, it continues to be a growth industry. The longer users have been on the Web, the more they tend to shop online.

His lone divagation from e-commerce — Amazon’s panoply of Web services, popular with gullible startups — is an exercise in renting out a computing infrastructure he’s built at great expense. It’s unlikely to be a better business than e-commerce, but it scores Bezos valuable press at little cost.

Mahaney’s stock analysis is not a shocker: The stock market undervalues persistence and overvalues change for change’s sake. What’s surprising is that so few people have taken this insight to the bank.

Amazon.com is moving its headquarters out of an aging hospital and into a shiny new corporate campus north of downtown developed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. One of the main draws? “Great access to public transportation,” company spokeswoman Patty Smith tells the Seattle Times. Ah yes, that would be the South Lake Union trolley — known locally by the acronym “SLUT.” Just think: 6,000-some Amazon workers riding the Slut. All in a day’s work. (Photo by Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

I know I’m not the only one thinking Amazon.com’s e-book reader Kindle sounds more like kindling, something that should be burned, rather than something that ignites ideas and revolutions — a problem that a good naming myth, well told, will not easily overcome. Fortunately for Bezos, Charlie Rose can’t help but interrupt his guests and provide the answers to his own questions. In an interview, the CEO fumbled through the origin of the e-book reader’s name. But why is Jeff Bezos completely failing to tell the true, compelling, and literary origins of the Kindle name?

Kindle’s definition “to ignite” is straightforward enough, but starting fires in the context of books? Fahrenheit 451, maybe, and we’re hardly the first to point that out. But there just happens to be a famous quote using kindle and books in the same context that states exactly Bezos’s vision … by the 18th century philosopher and satirist François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire:

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Certainly, this quote could have inspired the name. Wouldn’t Amazon be better served by invoking the highly-esteemed and quotable philosopher as the inspiration for their device in explaining Kindle to its literary audience? At least they’d have someone else to blame … and a dead guy who wrote a lot of books, at that.

So why no Voltaire tributes? Either Amazon wanted to avoid associating the only-available-in-America device with the hated French, or Jeff Bezos hoped to keep all of the credit to himself. I’ll assume the latter, and blame Bezos for the awkwardly named Kindle.

Boing Boing TV’s Thanksgiving music vid will give you an early case of turkey coma. BBtv producer Russ Gooberman is the prime culprit. Um, is it me or does that hen have an adam’s apple?

Source:Valleywag

Currently, the top three bestselling titles for Amazon.com’s Kindle, Jeff Bezos’s tree-killer killer, are newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Despite the fear that newspapers and magazines are dying, they are the most popular purchase on the future’s book killer. These traditional publications are all available online, mostly for free. Kindle purchasers, in other words are spendthrift, hyperliterate gadget junkies who feel guilty about both the environment and the demise of old media. Who besides Craig Newmark is buying this thing? I can’t wait to I buy a $20 Kindle on eBay — a past reminder of a failed future.

It may well be the second-worst job in the Valley after screening YouTube videos for copyrighted content. But we suspect that one of you twisted sorts reading this might actually enjoy this gig. Valleywag is looking for a video producer. Part of the job is sitting on your couch watching TV clips; part of it is getting out and about, digital camera in hand. If you’re interested, apply on Valleywag Jobs.

Source:Valleywag

Radiohead’s experiment in distributing In Rainbows, allowing consumers to download the album for free, highlights a growing problem in the music business: Kids these days, thanks to BitTorrent, don’t think they should pay for music. As more independent acts follow Radiohead’s lead, opting to make their cash touring, the record industry will struggle to find a new business model. Surprisingly, suing its customers actually seems to be working out . [Telegraph]

Source:Valleywag

MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte has insisted that his One Laptop Per Child program is a charity that will only sell its wares to governments of developing nations. So who convinced him it was okay to sell the device to consumers in North America and Europe at twice the price? Why, Negroponte pal Jeff Bezos, who knows a little bit about selling and marketing. Not only did the Amazon.com founder convince the philanthropist to turn his charity into a business, he convinced him that the best way to market the cute laptops was to turn them into a status symbol for the wealthy elite — a symbol on the order of Lance Armstrong’s iconic yellow Livestrong bracelets, which is where Bezos really got the idea.

What we are going to do is the following, and Jeff Bezos, bless his heart, he’s got wonderful creativity for these sorts of jingles. He said you know Nick there’s this expression, “Buy one and get two.” Yeah, they see that. He said you’ve got to… have a jingle that says, “Buy two and get one.” Bingo: 100 percent margin. So, we will release it in the United States and Europe on a buy two and get one basis where you pay whatever it is $300 for it, and what you’re doing is you’re buying one or more for a kid in Africa and when you walk around with this it will [be] like a yellow bracelet, it will be an expression, it will actually say that. [Sic.]

While this plan may actually finance the production of some devices for children in Africa, it also concedes that the One Laptop project cannot survive as a pure charity. And that the vaunted laptop its engineers have worked so hard to design will not, at first, serve to educate children. Instead, it will salve the fragile egos of wealthy geeks. That, too, is a subject on which Bezos might advise Negroponte.

Notable bombs like Pets.com and Kozmo.com at the height of the Internet bubble scared Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos out of the acquisition business. But he now appears to be cautiously filling up his cart again. So far this year, he’s done three publicly announced acquisitions of or investments in startups — more than he did, as far as we can tell, in the Internet-depression years of 2002 through 2004.

Data
8/6/2007 - Amie Street
2/25/2007 - Shelfari
2/16/2007 - Atomic Moguls
12/5/2006 - Wikia
2/27/2006 - Shopbop.com
6/1/2005 - CustomFlix
4/4/2005 - BookSurge LLC
4/1/2005 - Mobipocket.com
2/9/2005 - 43 Things
2/8/2005 - Robot Coop
8/19/2004 - Joyo.com Limited
12/1/2001- Egghead.com
12/1/2001 - OurHouse.com
11/9/2001 - Catalog City
2/1/2001 - Living.com
4/18/2000 - WineShopper.com
3/28/2000 - eZiba
2/18/2000 - Basis
2/3/2000 - Greg Manning Auctions, Inc.
1/31/2000 - Audible
1/24/2000 - Drugstore.com
1/21/2000 - Greenlight
1/11/2000 - Kozmo.com
12/1/1999 - Ashford
11/4/1999 - Convergence Corporation
11/1/1999 - Tool Crib of the North
11/1/1999 - Della.com
11/1/1999 - Back to Basics Toys
7/14/1999 - Gear.com
5/18/1999 - HomeGrocer.com
4/25/1999 - Accept.com
4/24/1999 - e-Niche Incorporated (Exchange.com, Bibliofind.com, and Musicfile.com)
4/1/1999 - LiveBid.com
3/29/1999 - Pets.com
2/1/1999 - Drugstore.com
2/1/1999 - Geoworks
1999 - MindCorps Incorporated (exact date unknown)
8/4/1998 - Sage Enterprises/PlanetAll
8/4/1998 - Junglee
4/27/1998 - Bookpages
4/27/1998 - Telebook
4/27/1998 - IMDB

If you are aware of any other investments or acquisitions not listed, please send them in.