A web-based calendar startup called Kiko put all of its assets up on eBay a little over a week ago as its founder explained on his blog. As far as I know, this is the first time a technology company has essentially sold itself on eBay for a six-figure amount. Seems like a fitting way to exit for a totally web-based company. Putting Kiko on the auction block caused a lot of buzz: Techcrunch placed Kiko in the deadpool (they seem to have taken a page from Pud), GigaOM called the space "crowded" and our most recent podcast guest Jason Calacanis reminded us revenues (rev-a-whats?) still matters for a business.

One of the most interesting parts of this transaction is that eBay -- along with all the publicity generated about the auction -- essentially acted as the investment banker for this deal, not that any self-respecting i-banker would touch a deal this small with a 10 foot poll. According to eBay's fee schedule, eBay netted a cool $3,891.86 on this deal. After larger percentage fee on the first $1,000, eBay charges 1.5% of the closing price. You can only get that kind of low rate with pro i-bankers at the $100 million mark according to past guest Fabrice Grinda's blog post. Can selling companies on eBay scale and create a more efficient market for startups, or is this a one off success caused by a high profile failure?

Download the MP3.

There are not many entrepreneurs who have spent their entire 10-year careers starting new ventures in online media, but Jason Calacanis just can’t help himself. Jason rode the dot com wave in New York by starting Silicon Alley Reporter. His publishing company Rising Tide Media grew to $12 million in sales. Unfortunately Jason also rode that wave down after the bubble burst. He ended up selling his first business to Dow Jones for a lot less money than he could have gotten before the crash. Undeterred, Jason started Weblogs, Inc. to make money by selling ads in blogs they pay people to write. In only 18 months he grew the business to a point at which AOL (TWX) bought it for a reported $25 million. Now he’s re-launched Netscape as a news website where users vote for what’s important. Jason’s caused a lot of controversy by paying top users of competitive sites such as Digg (whose CEO Jay Adelson was on our last show) to switch to use his service. Hear what’s been driving Jason’s entrepreneurial career.

Paramount studios announced today that they’ve severed ties with Tom Cruise after a 13 year relationship due to his “unacceptable” behavior. Strangely, Cruise’s agents claim that they terminated negotiations with Paramount after turning to a pair of hedge funds to finance Cruise’s future projects. Clearly, there’s more to this story: as my fiancee said, Tom Cruise could declare himself the spiritual leader of a small group of zebras and studios would still bank his movies if they believed in his money-making appeal. The real question is why would hedge funds want to get involved? Didn’t they see this?

A year ago, the Boston Globe wrote about how hedge funds are beginning to poach on venture firm’s traditional turf by financing early stage companies. I suppose a certain amount of “mission drift” is normal, but today’s move seems wacky.

From 1984, as he presents the original Macintosh computer:

The screaming crowd reminds me of footage of old Beatles’ concerts–maybe it’s the bow tie?

If there are three words an entrepreneur dreads hearing in the summer, perhaps it's "after Labor Day". People such as venture capitalists and customers who take things called vacations (what's that?) often say this to entrepreneurs trying to schedule meetings. In the startup world, a few weeks is a long time. On the other hand, maybe this is a sort of forced semi-vacation for entrepreneurs.

Umair at Bubblegeneration recently wrote a great note on the “post-network” economy–the main idea being that bland strategy is increasingly a commodity, and that in mind, the next great shift in value creation will come from creativity.

But what is creativity?

The best answer I’ve recently heard comes from Sir Ken Robinson. If you haven’t seen his talk from TED, available here, I recommend you check it out when you have a free 20 minutes.

In a nutshell, Robinson defines creativity as the process of generating original ideas that have value–and typically, these ideas come through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of looking at the world. Robinson argues that our current educational systems look for and cultivate a narrow set of skills–typically related to mathematics and language–at the expense of many others. As a result, he believes, we aren’t fully preparing ourselves for the future.

Robinson’s ideas (which deserve a much fuller explanation–check out the video) have significant implications for managers and policy makers. At a macro level, what is the right composition for functional teams tasked with key projects? What are the right metrics to track, measure, and change? How can different ways of thinking be effectively synthesized into a coherent plan?

At a micro level, what do you do to foster creativity? If you’re a software engineer, would it be helpful (not to mention fun) to visit an exhibit on Dada-inspired art? If you’re a painter, would you gain from building your own TiVo?

Kiko, the online calendar I picked as my favorite Ajax application back in September 2005, is now for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $49,999.99, with no takers yet.

While Kiko’s functionality was solid (and improving, especially with recent releases), the team apparently wasn’t able to develop a viable business model to compete with the many other free alternatives (30Boxes, CalendarHub, Airset, and–oh yeah–Google Calendar).

I suggest keeping an eye on company founders Justin Kan and Emmet Shear–they’ve no doubt learned lessons here and will go on to bigger and better projects…

CNet has an interesting gallery of doctored photos–worth a look, especially given the recent Reuters brouhaha (via Buzzmachine).

While there's no standard education to become an entrepreneur, almost every entrepreneur gets an early education in the lemonade business. The kids may be cute, but that doesn't mean they're not cut throat. In fact, Inc. Magazine just announced the Best Lemonade Stand in America Contest Winner.

In my last post, I described a new service that tracks what other sites are popular with my readers. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but one such site is the brand new blog of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran. It’s worth a look (but see the update below first)–in the upper right hand corner, you’ll find a series of flags. Clicking on the second from the left will translate the site into English from Persian (thanks, AfghanMania).

The site also has a “question of the day” feature. Today’s question is: “Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?” Currently, 71,844, or 55% of all replies say yes. 58,919, or 45%, say no.

Frightening.

More on Ahmadinejad here and here.

Update: apparently Ahmadinejad’s blog contains a trojan horse intended to attack visitors with Israel-based IP address who use Windows and Internet Explorer.

Update 2 (8/16/06): the latest word is that Ahmadinejad’s blog does not contain a trojan. For more, including technical details on what caused the initial alarm, see here (thanks, Steve).