Apparently, congratulations are due for Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget and the rest of the team over at Silicon Alley Insider: the site has apparently raised about $1-million or so in venture capital. PaidContent has the news — although Rafat and the gang at PC (who just got their own windfall of $30-million or so from Guardian Media Group) seem a little miffed that their scoop was broken by SIA itself, after Henry blogged the funding news. Alley Insider is part of a Web 2.0 holding company of sorts called Alley Corp., which was created by former Doubleclick execs Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, and recently launched two new properties: Clusterstock.com and The Business Sheet.

For many people, PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations are like root canals — you know they’re necessary, but they’re painful and they make you uncomfortable. And they’re a little like dental surgery in another way as well: they put a lot of people to sleep. That said, however, they are a fact of life, and SlideShare, which just got $3-million in funding, is one of the companies that has been doing its best to try and make them more interesting by letting people share them (it’s not aimed at helping you *create* them — that’s what companies like Zoho.com, SlideRocket.com and Empressr.com are trying to do). But can you really develop a community around something like that?

I think the answer could be yes. From my own point of view, I’ve put together a few PowerPoints for presentations to companies about social media and blogs and so on, and in doing so I spent a bunch of time looking around for examples. And I came across some good ones — like Dick Hardt’s presentation about Identity 2.0, which I highly recommend as an example of how to do it right, and which has become almost legendary in some circles. After all, giving a presentation is a kind of performance, and there are those who do it well. Some PowerPoint shorthand has even emerged, like the “Meet Henry.”

I’ve shared my “decks” or slides with others to get their feedback, and they’ve shared theirs with me. In some cases we’ve traded some really good slides if we’re giving similar presentations. And I’ve browsed through the “most popular” at SlideShare more than once, or the related items after searching for a term, and found some pretty good ones. You could argue that having something like SlideShare helps to improve the average calibre of PowerPoints — and that has to be a good thing, especially if you have to sit through them regularly :-)

Update:

Holy crap. Numerous sources — including the Bits blog at the NYT, as well as Mashable and Business Week — are reporting that Slide has raised $50-million, giving the company a valuation of $500-million. This seems almost unbelievable to me. Maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t see how even a popular Facebook widget can be worth the kind of money we’re talking about here, unless Slide has a more extended strategy that I’m not seeing. For their sake, I hope so.

Original post:

Kara Swisher of All Things D says she’s hearing talk that Slide, the widget company founded by Max Levchin, is close to getting a bunch of funding that will value the company at “many times” its most recent $60-million to $80-million valuation. If that happens, it would be a pretty big boost for makers of Facebook apps. But is a company whose products consist of widgets such as SuperPoke and a slideshow really worth $100-million, or $200-million, or (God forbid) $300-million?

At the moment, Slide and another app-maker called RockYou are the Coke and Pepsi of the Facebook widget game, with several spots in the list of top widgets each. Over the past six months or so they have jockeyed for top spot, with RockYou claiming those honours just before Christmas. Slide has SuperPoke, RockYou has X Me; Slide has FunWall, RockYou has SuperWall; Slide has Top Friends and RockYou has Zombies. Each one has millions of “users.” But what are they worth?

In a recent post, I looked at the numbers put out by Adonomics — a Facebook app consulting company — which argues that apps like FunWall are worth $30-million based on an ad model that the company has come up with. As I noted in that post, however, much of what goes into those numbers is just guesswork, and maybe a little wishful thinking as well. Can something like FunWall produce enough actual value that we can say (in any real sense) it is “worth” $30-million?

File this one under the “No Surprise” heading in the VC database: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the guy who is probably the most closely identified with Web 2.0 apps — if only because he seems to have one of every kind of Web widget in the sidebars on his blog — has funded Twitter, the micro-blogging service with the 140-character limit.

For anyone unfamiliar with Twitter, it is like the status update on Facebook but without the Facebook part. It is a quick way of updating people on what you’re doing/thinking/feeling/eating, etc. If you’re Robert Scoble, it’s a way for you to spam thousands of people with details on your every thought and movement (just kidding, Scobie), and there are add-ons like the audio Twittergram and so on that I don’t really know anything about. At the moment, with Twitter and Facebook and Pownce.com and MSN and GTalk and half a dozen other things, I have so many status update services that I’m overwhelmed.

In other words, I’ve pretty much given up, and Twitter now just pushes blog posts out to whoever is following me, and I track some other people’s blog posts the same way. Is it worth investing in? Fred seems to think so (and so do Marc Andreessen and some others), although even Fred admits he’s not sure what the business model is. I’m not sure either.

Update 2 @ 1:24 Feb. 11:

More info on the exact nature of Ms. Devouard’s comments at Laurent Haug’s blog — he’s one of the founders of Lift (a hat tip to Scoble for the link). Sounds like the three months is a bit of an exaggeration, but at the same time, Wikipedia still appears to be a little short of cash. A good overview from Bruno Giussani here.

Update @ 5:32 Feb. 10:

Seth Finkelstein says a hard look at Wikipedia’s numbers suggests that the comments by Ms. Devouard are an exaggeration. And my friend Rob Hyndman brings up an interesting point: What ever happened to all the talk about Google providing free hosting and bandwidth to Wikipedia? That idea came up at one point in 2005 and the two seemed close to a deal, but then nothing happened.

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Florence Devouard, chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation, caused a bit of a stir at the recent Lift conference in Geneva by suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of money and could “disappear” — a comment I first saw at Nick Carr’s blog (nice of Nick not to dance on Wikipedia’s grave, considering he said last year that the enterprise was effectively dead). The original report came on a blog written by Philippe Mottaz, a Swiss multimedia producer and journalist. According to his report, Ms. Devouard told the conference:

“Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for about three to four months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear.”

There is also a similar report from Bruno Giussani, an author and the European director of the TED conferences. Meanwhile, a Wikimedia staff member named Sandy Ordonez has posted a comment on Nick’s post saying “Ms. Devouard’s comment was taken out of context” and that “Wikipedia will not be closing any time soon. Ms. Devouard was simply referring to the ongoing, pressing needs for funds that Wikipedia, like most nonprofit organizations, face.”

That seems like a bit of a stretch to me — it’s hard to imagine in what other context you could use the word “disappear.” But perhaps Ms. Devouard was simply using her platform at Lift to raise awareness that Wikipedia needs donations to continue. According to Mr. Giussani, Wikipedia now has 350 servers and requires at least $5-million U.S. just to keep the service alive, let alone grow. A recent fundraising drive raised $1-million.

A couple of things spring to mind — the first being: Couldn’t Chad Hurley or Steve Chen, who are now multimillionaires, or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or one of a dozen other billionaire geeks cough up a measly $1-million or $2-million to keep the lights on at Wikipedia? And the second is whether this might revive interest in Jason Calacanis’s idea of running small ads on the site, which he said at one point was worth as much as $5-billion (he has more on the ad idea here).

Oh yes, and one other thing: Why doesn’t Wikipedia do a deal with Amazon to use its S3 virtual hosting to handle the site’s data demands? Don McAskill, CEO of SmugMug, says doing that has saved the photo-sharing site about $500,000 a year, and they’re only using it for part of their site.