Om Malik says eyeballs are regaining their luster: "While Om Malik says that online visitors are worth $38 each, Jason Calacanis values them at $1 to $3." —BusinessWeek

Google Shares Seen Surpassing $500 Mark: "Google Inc. shares popped another 2 percent Monday after one Wall Street analyst predicted the Web-search giant's stock price could hit $500 within the next 12 months." —AP via Yahoo! Finance

Hell, why not? In fact, let's just set a target at $1,000 and be done with it.

The CueCat Is Back: "In 2000, the CueCat scanner became a symbol of tech-industry cluelessness. Distributed to millions of magazine subscribers, the scanner redirected readers to advertisers' web pages after they scanned a bar code printed in the magazine. But few people used it, and the CueCat became the target of almost universal derision. Now it's back—in German mobile phones." —Wired News

Lame 2.0.

San Jose airport traffic up, cargo down: "Air traffic at Mineta San Jose International inched upward in October, with 901,825 passengers coming through the airport's two terminals, a 1.8 percent increase from October 2004." —Silicon Valley Business Journal

Why does Silicon Valley, the heart of the engine of the most robust economy in the world, have such a junky airport?

Reporting from Deep Inside the Bubble: Geek Entertainment TV Cracks Me Up: "Geek Entertainment TV is an emerging global media empire, reporting from deep inside the bubble as it re-inflates. GETV covers buzzword compliant topics such as web 2.0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs." —Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo)

Year’s Biggest Tech Fund: $1.4B: "Return of the mega-funds? No way, says venture group." —Red Herring

$1.4B? You call that a mega-fund? Ha!

Pajamas Media Closes $3.5 Million Venture Round: "Pajamas Media, a new media venture designed to bring together bloggers, journalists and commentators under a single umbrella, today announced it has closed its first round of private financing in the amount of $3.5 million." —Yahoo! Finance

This must be the new New Media. Nice.

Google to pick up Riya?: "A Riya deal could make sense for Google, since the company's technology would seem to fit with Google's strategy to 'build products that organize the world's information.' But $40 million for a startup with no income?" —Download Squad

To which I say, "Only 40?"

VC Action: More Angel Funding: "Deal flow improves for angel investors as venture firms snub early-stage investments." —Red Herring

Where the Affordable Homes Are: "If you want a housing bargain in the Southwest, head for the Lone Star State. The housing boom seems to have passed right over Texas. ... You'd be hard-pressed to find a bargain anywhere in California, which is probably the most overvalued state in the Union. In the San Francisco metro area, the median price is $722,000." —BusinessWeek

Hint to would-be Boom 2.0 startup founders: lower cost of living means lower salary OPEX, which ultimately means more wealth-creation bang for your VC buck.

Overhyped, Unprofitable Dot Coms Going Public? Bubble? What Bubble?: "[Buy.com] filed to go public today, even though it's still unprofitable. Wall Street is waking up to tech IPOs again..." —Techdirt

Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the [Bubble 1.0 and 2.0] streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad?"
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon!

Babble not Bubble 2.0: "The recent frenzy to fund say five to-do-lists, or five video hosting sites or whatever. What we have is ‘Babble 2.0.’ We are talking about these new tiny-tots in breathless tones (I am guilty as charged!) and talking a lot… all the time. We are not asking the 'show me the money' questions. That is giving VC community some kind of a nervous tic, and an itch to invest... as much as they can... now. I think the babble is leading to over investments, and hence the general sense of a bubble." —Om Malik

Housing Bubble Insurance: "Just in time for the apparent top of the housing market, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is introducing futures and options on housing prices in 10 cities for the second quarter of 2006." —Slate

Google data centers and dark fiber connections: "We could be on the verge of another web innovation cycle reminiscent of 1995. Some entrepreneurs have spent the last two years building products and services in anticipation of this wave. The fun is about to begin." —Don Dodge

Hear, hear!

Building a Better Boom: "So sure, there are too many start-ups, and sure, some venture capitalists are trying to get in on as many as they can. In the meantime, far more companies are starting that just might change the world, or at least interesting parts of it, and thanks to the lessons of the past, we now have an ecosystem that may enable them to make a serious go of it." —John Battelle, writing for The New York Times

VCs vs. The Platforms: "Levene mentioned to me later that Google has even set up a fund to compete with VCs for early stage company financing (I had not head this before), and that Yahoo feels it can and must compete to buy early stage companies before VCs can get in with larger financing. An interesting development. " —John Battelle

Celebrity Deathmatch: Eric Schmidt vs. John Doerr! Fight!

Music Discovery Service Pandora Gets $12 Million Funding: "Pandora Media, an online music discovery service which is getting a lot of blog-love these days, has raised $12 million in third round of funding." —PaidContent.org

Google Shares Top $400: "The search giant continues its frenetic rise, hitting the $400 mark just a year after it went public." —Red Herring

For the record, that gives the kids in Mountain View a market cap just shy of $112B.

Google Base as a platform: "Something tells us this is going to grow very fast, in ways we can't even imagine yet." —SiliconBeat

This Internet thing could be big!

No Ad Space at the Inn: "There is fairly remarkable story in today's WSJ about how escalating demand and sorely limited supply have pushed ad rates on major sites up to 'Super Bowl' levels. Specifically, the front page slot for large display ads at Yahoo, AOL,and MSN are sold out well in advance, as much as eighteen months out." —Paul Kedrosky (UCSD)

Friendster up for salester: "Earlier this year, Friendster was shopping for a buyer, and according to the story, it was looking for a sale price in the ballpark of $200 million. Now its price has been lowered to the range of $50 million to $100 million." —SiliconBeat

Not bad for a Web 1.5 property.

The House of Paaaaaaain: "That’s the lead story in today’s WSJ, and, as usual, it arrives six months too late to help anybody stuck with a just-closed-on McMansion in Upper Bergen County." —Jeff Matthews

My recommendation: get out of real estate and plow your money into Web 2.0 startups. You'll rue the day you ignored my advice.

Attention has arrived: "I spent most of last week in NYC and at Ad-Tech, the premier internet advertising conference, and was reminded of more exuberant times in 1999 before the bubble burst." —Craig Barnes (Attensa)

A new wave of user-friendly and interactive Internet technologies is turning the heads of venture capitalists: "In the third quarter, venture capitalists poured $394 million into 51 Internet companies that cater to individuals online, up from just $116 million in 17 companies during the same quarter two years ago, according to VentureOne." —MercuryNews.com

I'd like to point out that GOOG is flirting a share price that just one year ago Paul Kedrosky called "a gob-smacking wild-eyed target" in his blog post Do I Hear Google $400?.

When to catch a stock's popularity wave: "Owning a stock as it becomes increasingly popular is like surfing when you get on board a big wave way off shore—and equally satisfying. The key in both cases is identifying well in advance which waves are worth betting on." —MarketWatch

News Site Newsvine Gets $5 Million Funding: "Is this really novel? I've heard of countless other sites offering or promising to offer similar functionalities... I guess $5 million will tell us the answer down the line." —PaidContent.org

Web 2.0 Exit… what is that?: "When I asked these panelists whose search engines are basically are scraping other sites, cannibalizing the folks that provide the ‘content’ for their sites, what was their exit strategy? Answer: dead silence." —Om Malik

That's no way to build a bubble.

Buybacks soar at high-tech firms as cash levels rise: "Intel Corp.'s plans to buy back $25 billion of its stock is the latest in a two-year surge during which U.S. high-tech firms have set forth repurchase programs totaling more than $158 billion." —MarketWatch

It warms my heart to see "soar", "high-tech", and "cash" in the same headline.

Visto going for broke in push email: "Visto, the Redwood City provider of mobile push email, said it got another $70 million in financing from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and existing investors. That's a horde of cash, especially for a company that has previously raised at least $80 million." —SiliconBeat

Feel the dilution washing over you. Yes, that's it. Become one with the dilution.

Tech IPOs Post Gains: "Saifun and iRobot gain more than 20% in their market debuts after shares price above the expected range." —Red Herring

It's so cool that a robot company IPO'd! I refuse to let the fact that their robots are actually vacuum cleaners dampen my enthusiasm.

Toll Bros. selloff may signal bursting home bubble: "After years of heady gains driven by strong demand for housing and low mortgage rates, homebuilder stocks have been on a downtrend since August on jitters the housing market may finally be losing steam." —MarketWatch

Same story, better headline.

Largest Luxury Maker of Homes Cuts Forecast: "Toll Brothers said that the era of soaring home prices might have ended and that price growth appeared to be reverting to more historical patterns." —New York Times

Assume crash positions and brace for impact!

Entrepreneur trades in employees who work for startup equity : "The basic concept of tech executives working for equity isn't new. For years, founders of startups have compensated themselves and a few key employees with stock options instead of cash. Recruiters have occasionally placed executives in such situations and taken their own payment in the form of stock. But PeopleConnect is the first search firm to market a program of recruiting employees who will work for equity." —Scripps Howard News Service

Will work for options. Hmm. (Via Venture Intelligence India.)

Paul Graham on the Venture Capital Squeeze - or will founders be able to get VC funding AND partially cash out?: "Will a partial buyout clause make their way into early stage VC termsheets? I would say no, but then - there was a time when you had to give away percentage points of your company to find new digs... just because there was a lot of competition." —Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC)