New York Times reports that plaxo is up for sale and is looking for around $100M. Plaxo is the only good player i know that does contact sync. I personally think that this is a very important space that no one has come up with a reasonably good solution. In a perfect world I want a service that triple syncs pervasively (web, computer, mobile device), normalize the data to help me migrate to new mobile devices, helps me find old contacts (like facebook) and find new contacts (like linkedin)

I know that most people manage all their contacts thru their cell phone and if they lose their cell phone one day, all their contact info goes with it. Plaxo no only syncs and backups your contacts on your computer with their website, it also keeps it updated by social networking, so that if one of your contacts is also a plaxo user any updates they make to their profile will be sync with your address book as well. I would call it a address book 2.0. When i first used it, i thought the important element it missed from social networking was to let me see who my contacts knew, as this is a important feature of social networking sites to enable you to find old contacts you don;t have in your address book thru people you know.

On a side note, plaxo has a new feature, called plaxo pulse, which is pretty awesome as it syncs my mac (iCal and address book) with their servers and gCal. plaxo pulse does this seemlessly after i sync my iPhone with my Mac. Now i never have to worry about losing my contact info even if i loose my phone or macbook pro. I highly recommend people to use this even if they don’t use a mac or an iphone.

Found a good article that profiles the top 20 worst internet ventures.  These ventures are judged by the way they burned through venture money and ultimately went bust.  Each of these ventures got at least $100M and some even went public in the internet hay days.  Good read to see what ideas fail no matter how much money is thrown at it and that venture capital companies sometimes aren’t as smart as they want you to believe them to be.

everyone knows that mp3 are killing the record companies, but if you ever wondered why after all these years record companies haven’t really done anything to compete, except sue people, the reason is the people at the every top.  Wired did a profile on Universal’s CEO, and from what his stance and action on the internet revolution it is no wonder they failed.  An example, he says reporters got it all wrong when they write that record people missed the opportunity, because actually, they knew about it but didn’t know what to do.  Read the whole profile here.