This was a great post by TheNextWeb!15 Dumbest Names

Some of my favorites from the list:

I’d like to add a few of my own:

Cramster, an online study community, just raised a series A round of funding. Our economy is sliding off the face of the earth and VCs are still funding *ster companies?!?!?!?!?!?! Didn’t VCs stop funding *space metoo companies like a hundred years ago? Even *tube ripoffs have died down in the last 50 years. It’s even been a few months since I’ve seen a VC fund a company that’s missings vwls in its name. What’s next—a new round of *soft fundings?

http://startonomics.com/blog/the-startup-think-tank-how-to-avoid-the-pownce-effect/

I called Pownce stupid well over a year ago. It’s still stupid. Who cares that Kevin Rose started it? I have my own advice above and beyond what startonomics.com has. I call it my top 3 rules.

1) Have a good and differentiated product

2) Have a good and differentiated product

3) Have a good and differentiated product

hehe…as I went to get a screenshot, Pownce was down! They are taking after Twitter in more ways than one!!!!!

Here, Gigaom discusses the lifecycle of a startup. But they forgot one crucial step:

Being featured on SuckyStartups!!!

One day an entrepreneur is chatting with his friends, gets an idea, writes about the idea on his or her blog, and then starts coding. A few weeks or possibly days, a beta — increasingly a euphemism for a not-fully-thought-out-product — emerges.

THE LAUNCH
Then the buzz builds and the company opens up the beta far and wide. Maybe TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily or WebWare write about the product.

The missing sentence:
“Then SuckyStartups blogs about it, telling it like it is. No differentiation. Me too. No business model. No chance.”

THEN…

LAUNCH A SOCIAL NETWORK WIDGET
If the user adoption press releases, the widget and subsequent coverage can’t get your site growing again, it’s time for the big guns…the open API.

In between

They ain’t a startup, but it’s worth a mention anyway…CompUSA is closing all their stores. I wonder what took ‘em so long. I remember getting my 386 there and upgrading the RAM from 4 to 8MB. Good times. Even then, the employees didn’t know what they were talking about.

Kleiner Perkins ain’t investing in Web 2.0. Instead, they’re goin’ back to basics and investing in Web 0.2.

SiliconValleyWatcher has the details, but Randy Komisar said it himself: “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies.”

Not willing to take them at their word, I took a stroll through their portfolio. One company that stood out is called “Pinger,” which enables “people to communicate with their voice in new and remarkably convenient ways.” Notice the spelling of the company. If this were a web 2.0 company, it would be called Pingr and it would be in beta.

A different portfolio company, Aggregate Knowledge, doesn’t get off so easy. They’re described as definitively web 2.0: “Unlike enterprise software that takes months to deploy, Aggregate Knowledge is a real-time Web 2.0 service that deploys in days and offers customers a performance-based pricing model.”

If people stop investing in web 2.0, what the hell am I going to write about?!!?