Only way to stay in business is to adapt constantly

There is an on-going battle between Craigslist and PadMapper.  PadMapper had been scrapping user posting from Craigslist, and earlier Craigslist responded by issuing cease-and-decease notice to them.  PadMapper responded by partnering with 3taps to provide Craigslist posts to its users.  Subsequently Craigslist sued 3taps citing copyright laws.  3taps responded with its counter-suit against Craigslist today.

3taps is taking the legal battle against Craigslist to another level.
You can read the press release from  http://3taps.com/

Watching all the legal tit for tat, we can easily lose sight of what is really important.  That is customers.  At the end of the day, it does not matter who wins the legal argument because that is not going to help you retain the customers.  Customers are interested in solving their problem.  Customer will always choose what works.  Whether it is Craigslist, 3tap, PadMapper or all three working in conjunction, it does not matter to customers.

Craig Newmark: Know when to get out of the way

Recently I saw a couple of posts on Craigslist.  How Craigslist page has not changed in any major way since its initial launch yet how effective it still is at what it does.  I happen to know this first hand because when I did my last job search, I started out with Craigslist and ended up finding a position.  What kept Craigslist successful over all these years, I began to wonder.


After searching a bit on the web, I found the guy behind Craigslist, Craig Newmark.  He is the founder of Craigslist.  Soon I found out that he's a fairly unassuming guy who values the Golden Rule and knows what things are outside his strength.  Once he realized managing people and running the company was not what he was good at, he went out and hired Jim Buckmaster as CEO.

Here's what I picked up from reading up on Craig Newmark and how Craigslist still is highly effective classified site:

AngelList: HotOrNot For Startups

After seeing about 20 tweets talking about 'angellist', I couldn't help but look. For a moment I thought it was yet another fallout from angelgate that I wrote about last year. It sounded like a leaked document outlining shady angel investment practices...

Got Killer Idea But No Seed Money?
AngelList Might Get You The Other Wing You Need...

In reality it was not. AngelList is a craigslist-like service for startups, but with a touch of crowd sourcing. In Hollywood executive pitch, I would call it HotOrNot for startups; connecting entrepreneurs with angel investors.

That seemed straight forward, but there have been lots of tweets about what we might be losing and what we might be gaining because of AngelList. Some praised it as break-through in venture funding (as Dave McClure wrote on his 500 Startup blog) while others cautioned the indiscriminate use of it citing increasing signs of overblown hightech startup bubble (as Mark Suster wrote on TechCrunch).

Which is it? Is AngelList a boon to angel investment and startup community or a failed experiment because of decreasing signal-to-noise ratio?