Web services startups

More than 100 web services startups are profiled in a new report compiled by Deloitte & Touche Corporate Finance. This is an updated and much expanded reprise of a report the same team put together last year, and which I highlighted here in May 2002. It's an invaluable document for anyone who wants to quickly get to grips with the backgrounds and financing of the most significant private companies in the web services arena. It also happens to do an excellent job of categorizing the players, and so will be a great help to anyone who wants to understand the emerging shape of the web services industry.

I'm very pleased to say that the authors have kindly asked Loosely Coupled to make the report available to its readers, which I am now able to do here. Because the report is a 3MB PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) file, there is a simple registration process to go through, which is designed solely to ration bandwidth demands from downloading a file of that size.

To access the report, simply enter your email address here: and then click this button: If you'd like to get occasional emails from us about further web services reports from various sources as they become available, please also check this box: Registration is only for our own use; we respect your privacy and won't pass your details to third parties.

When you click the button, a separate popup window will appear, confirming the email address you entered, and with a link from which you can download the report. When you click on the link, you'll see a dialog box asking you for an ID and password. Re-enter your email as the ID and leave the password field blank, and you'll begin downloading the file.
posted by Phil Wainewright 7:15 AM (GMT) | comments | link

On vacation

The sudden dearth of weblog postings here in the past week is because I have sneaked off to have a long-overdue vacation in Thailand. There was not enough bandwidth from the island of Samui to keep up with happenings in the world of web services (connecting at 33k and at long-distance call rates certainly concentrates the mind when online), so there seemed little point in attempting to contribute material.

Instead, I and my wife have busied ourselves with sightseeing and beach activities, which she assures me is the sort of thing you're supposed to do on vacation anyway. The excellent service and idyllic surroundings at the Tongsai Bay resort have helped make this a very relaxing experience. Just to prove the point, here is picture of me with a trained monkey (click on the thumbnail to see a larger version). For those who are interested, this was taken with a handy Sony DSC-U20 digital camera I picked up at the airport duty-free shop. It's not got as many megapixels and features as some models, but it's extremely compact in size and fits neatly in my pocket.

I am still traveling, so postings will remain patchy for the next few days. However the rest of the site is still active, thanks to my fellow-writers Keith Rodgers and David Longworth, who are continuing to contribute regular feature articles, while David is also doing a grand job of updating the week's top news headlines.
posted by Phil Wainewright 1:42 AM (GMT) | comments | link