PageFlakes Low Pageviews & Out Of Gas (cash)

Personalized web page startup Pageflakes is running out of cash and is desperately seeking a buyer reports Gigaom. Pageflakes aggregates RSS feeds and widgets in a customizable AJAX-based personal web page.

Pageflakes has around 1.5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. However that pales in comparison to their closest pure competitor Netvibes. However, the real competitors are Google's iGoogle, Yahoo's 360, Microsoft and AOL which too offer personalized web pages. The cost of these services is borne by their core offerings.

However, Pageflakes's personalized page is their core offering and it is much harder to monetize. Further to garner premium ad dollars the site needs serious traffic, which costs money. Again the majors can acquire traffic simply by putting up a "tab" to their personalized web page offerings.

According to Gigaom Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg and many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that rely of on VCs money will find life increasingly tough once the money stops flowing (See Crash 2.0 Coming). At least Pageflakes has interested buyers, even if they are not big spenders.

Google Gadget Ventures Announced at Searchnomics

Google's Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, officially announced yesterday at the Searchnomics 2007 Conference the launch of Google Gadget Ventures. Members of the press including ABC7 News were on hand to get the breaking news scoop. Marissa introduced the program during her closing Keynote address. If you are familiar with the personalized Google homepage, iGoogle, where users can add widgets/gadgets created by others or better yet create your own personalized gadgets, then this program is a spinoff of this. If your Google gadget generates a quarter of a million page views weekly, you are eligible for a $5K grant to build it out further and once you have received the grant you can then apply for an additional $100K seed capital to build a business around the Google gadgets platform. A program such as this facilitates among other things innovation and from a business perspective, even more reasons to stay on the Google site. For more information, see the Official Google Blog post on this program. (See as well my previous blog post on iGoogle.)