sumolabs

Unless you have been living under a very large rock, you are well aware of the financial turmoil that is ripping through financial markets and the housing sector in the US. It has been causing outrageous commodity prices, higher than normal market volatility, and a general 'bearish' attitude towards the worldwide economy.

So then, what are the effects of these jitters on the investment environment for investors that invest in web 2.0 related ventures?

For starters, many argue that the Tech IPO Window has Slammed Shut. That being said, I think entreprenuers are going to have to face some realities.

There is a good thread on LinkedIn about this, readable here:

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/financial-markets/equity-markets/MKT_EQU...

Previously, I blogged about the Pros & Cons of the Pay Amazon Web services.

Basically, the biggest con was a lack of service level agreement (SLA). "How can a third party seriously build a profitable application or service on top of something that has no uptime guarantee or refund consequence for severe outages?"

I am now happy to have learned, that Amazon (as of October 1st, 2007) does provide service level agreements for their S3 storage service, which was designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

A big pat on the back for Jeff Bezos. Web companies can now leverage Amazon's offerings with piece of mind.

Heck, it feels good to sleep at night.

I hate remembering logins to all the sites I use. What is worse is half the blogs out there try to get you to register just to post. My memory is already in scarce supply.

That is why I like OpenID. And I've blogged out it before and how boss-awesome it would be to have this implemented over the breadth of the internet.

Drupal, a very popular open source content management system, recently announced that it will be including OpenID version in the next major release of Drupal.

There are thousands upon thousands of Drupal sites out there, many of which are blogs and many of which are popular. The inclusion of OpenID support in the next release (v6.0) is the next step in a global internet-wide nonpartisan centralized authentication system.

Today I stumbled on a great find: planhq.com. Planhq promised to help you build a complete and successful business plan, and Turn your ideas into a startup.

So, if you are having a little trouble putting together a business plan, and need a web based wizard interface to finish the job -- Planhq seems to be a great tool. They also have a 30 day trial, which is more than an adequate amount of time to get in, collaborate, and see if the tool can fulfill its value proposition.

Google released a very early release of Google Gears (BETA) today - an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs. This is going to change the web.

More: http://gears.google.com/