Corporate Incubators

Gigaom has written about Yahoo’s latest initiative…an internal incubator appropriately named Brickhouse. The project will be run by Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr.

What’s really interesting is Caterina’s thoughts on incubators…she has a link from her blog to a post by David Hornik in which he talks about the benefits of incubators and concludes:

Traditional incubators and economic grants can do more harm than good to a startup culture when there is not already a well-engrained and robust entrepreneurial ecosystem upon which these startups may grow and thrive.

I totally agree with David on this point and will be looking to see how Yahoo provides the right ecosystem for its incubatees to grow into sustainable businesses.

All Web 2.0: the directory

You want all web 2.0 and you want it right now.

Well, you go it – in one browser: Go2web20.

Enjoy, and say thank to Orli Yakuel sometime.

Attention gets deeper Roots

Root Markets, which was set up in 2005 by purple cow marketing guru, Seth Goldstein, has garnered seed funding from the Chicago Board of Trade. Seth sees this as rather apt, given that Root is a financial exchange for consumer leads and the CBOT was the first exchange to trade interest rate futures contracts.

This is a very interesting initiative worthy of close watch. Essentially, per the Root site they focus on leads…which are personal data that express an individual’s intent to purchase, and the quality of the leads Roots generates is increased through their ability to qualify intentions through a series of consumer focused applications.

Read more on Seth’s blog, or here.