Startups: the Crazy Ones, the Misfits, the Rebels ... the Dumb

An anonymous reader writes Many companies emerged in 2014 offering new ways to help people connect, get stuff done, or find that special someone. Slack, for example, offers a chatty alternative to work email. Or Yonomi might actually make an Internet connected home feasible. But other new startups, looking for that new and original thing, peddled products that were gimmicky, legally unsound, or just not super useful. On the other hand, sometimes things that seem gimmicky get revised down the road; Kozmo.com is my favorite example — the business model might not have been perfect, but the underlying idea wasn't so bad. Sometimes there's a large not-being-the-first-mover advantage.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you anonymous kozmo PR person for your submission!

Re: Slashvertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure of the business viability of a defunct company paying a PR person to submit a link to a Wikipedia article. Maybe he's the Flying Dutchman of advertising!

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Ghost writers in the sky [youtube.com].

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[BarbaraHudson]

Well, it's a good way to remind people of Kosmo.com, so that they're more receptive to the same concept, except this time it's different because we use DRONES!!!.

Why Kozmo sort of succeeded

[billstewart]

Ok, the company as a whole tanked rapidly, as one might expect, but according to friends who lived in its territory at the time, one reason the service was so popular was that one of the things it delivered was weed. The company itself didn't sell it, but the drivers did that themselves, so they were happy and the customers were happy, and there were an awful lot of deliveries that had only one random item on the books (plus weed.)

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[Dragonslicer]

The link to kozmo isn't part of the submission, it was added by the "editor".

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[Aighearach]

Timmy never even heard of an internet-connected home before, that's why he fell for it.

How much did Kosmo.com pay for this link?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to Slashdot, this is bullshit. Stop with these advertisements disguised as stories.

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[ArcadeMan]

I much prefer the old days when stories were disguised as advertisements and users didn't have referred links in their damn signatures.

P.S.: please check out the links in my signature!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to untangle your man-panties. The company has been dead since 2001. The link points to a wikipedia article, and the actual kozmo.com website is an image with an e-mail link (probably the domain is for sale).

If anything, Slashdot's readership and commentariat is in decline. I'm finding Slashdot less and less enjoyable these days. I guess they were chased out by Beta.

Kozmo Klones

[FairAndUnbalanced]

These guys seem to be building on the Kozmo model, but it looks like they're trying to make money this time :-) : Favor Delivery [favordelivery.com]

And today is different how?

[koan]

It was founded by young investment bankers Joseph Park and Yong Kang in March 1998 in New York City, and was out of business by April 2001. The company is often referred to as an example of the dot-com bubble.[2]

I wonder if the author knows them.

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[khallow]

So what is the "great lie" of the market. What you quoted sounds more like a great truth.

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[fermion]

So a diamond is essentially worthless, but good upselling makes it worth a lot. This values pays for the processing and marketing of the stone. In the US, for instance, 50 years of brainwashing has made couples forgo homes and food to buy a rock. In the case of the apparently paid link, they are a delivery service. The problem is that it is hard to create enough value for delivery. Overhead, profits, and minimum wage means that someone is not going to pay a large delivery fee, the value is not going to

If you're going to name your new software slack...

[TWX]

...you're going to have a bad time.

People have been referring to Slackware as "slack" since it debuted. There should be plenty of prior art to prevent a trademark.

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[DoofusOfDeath]

...you're going to have a bad time.

FWIW, I use Slack for work, and I find it really useful. It's a pretty good way to connect normal email, github emails, and chat.

My only real beef with Slack is that its markdown language is a bit different than, and inferior to, Github's. Which is an annoyance when, for example, github markdown messages are rendered by Slack.

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[radarskiy]

1) Prior art is irrelevant to trademarks, it is current usage that matters.
2) Slackware themselves do not conduct trade using the name "Slack" .
3) Trademarks apply to domains, and there's no one in a position to install either who could mistake one's domain for the other's.

My new TV catchphrase based app

[grumling]

Just because something you said on a TV show became popular online doesn’t mean we need an app built around it. It would be one thing if it were a clever word or phrase, but it’s not.

So my new "Up your nose with a rubber hose." app might not be the next big thing?

For those of you under 40... [wikipedia.org]

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[BarbaraHudson]

Just because something you said on a TV show became popular online doesn’t mean we need an app built around it. It would be one thing if it were a clever word or phrase, but it’s not.

So my new "Up your nose with a rubber hose." app might not be the next big thing?

For those of you under 40... [wikipedia.org]

Well, you could always try "He's dead, Jim!" Star Trek will have more cross-generation appeal than Happy Days (though Happy Days is where we got "jumped the shark" from)

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[lucm]

You speak like the hybrid cylon pilots in Galactica.

100th idiot

[dasunt]

The only way I can see these people getting their crazy plans funded is through the 100th idiot effect amidst venture capitalists.

From _Matter_ by Iain M. Banks: "100 idiots make idiotic plans, and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot whose plans succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius."