Odds and Sods

News today that reducing the speed limit in UK cities to 20mph saves 42% of casualties and that this should be rolled out forthwith - BBC.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine study estimates 20mph zones have the potential to prevent up to 700 casualties in London alone.

Now, some people are very grumpy and feel that this would spoil the ability of cars to move on roads and thus fulfil their purpose, and others feel that the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine should carry on working in Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, not Traffic managment, But we feel they haven't gone far enough.

Why stop at 20mph? Surely every life is sacred? For example, if we can save 42% ( 700 lives in London - pop 11mn ) then if we went down to 10mph we could save say 66%!. In fact, why not go back to the Locomotive Act of 1865 - having a man with a red flag walk in front at 4 mph, as they did a hundred years ago. That's bound to get to 90% + saved.

And it would of course ensure that the country was totally green and we hit our emission reduction targets as no one would really use a car anymore, plus if we put up the price of public transport by 500% we could repay the national debt in just a few years. Bonus!

Now we would not propose that it goes to 0 mph and 100% lives saved, as that means no one would buy cars anymore, and that is bad for the economy

There is a fascinating little article in today's (UK) Sunday Times, tracing how the Climate Change Sceptics have been deliberately excluded from the mainstream media and political argument for the last 5 years or so, but have managed to use blogs and other social media to reach their audience.

That this has been so is not really arguable anymore, the recent ClimateGate emails also point to a deliberate attempt to squash debate - and potentially even to falsify data, though hopefully the inquiry will get to the truth of that.

(An aside - I note with interest by the way that all the Pro Climate Change articles in the Sunday Times are online, all the sceptical ones are not (so I can't point to the one that interested me). Is this the way news will go - you have to pay for the stuff you don't want to hear? )

Anyhow, the point that really interested me is the role of blogging in getting a message out around what amounts to censorship. Yet again, the 'umble blog is emerging as the organ of free speech while the mainstream media yet again emerges as the chief sales organ of the Official Line. As it has with The Crunch and various other unpopular things wot White People don't like such as resistance to immigration etc etc. But of all the Secular Religions, the Climate Change one has taken the strongest hold.

It also strikes me that many who most deeply believe in it have the flimsiest grasp on the actual science, it seems to me that those who do know something about physics, maths or even - god forbid - actual thermodynamics, are those that are the more doubtful Thomasses. Not that many totally disagree you understand, just that scientifically trained people seem more aware of how unclear the underlying data is within the big picture of the Earth's warming and cooling cycles, especially regarding Man-Made global warming.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of reducing fossil fuel usage, pollution, wasted resources making tat etc etc, but I think there is a huge risk in drinking all the the Climate Change Cult Kool Aid, as much of it has more to do with money and power than ecology and will lead to the wrong decisions if not challenged - a view I note that the original Climate Change scientists are also now airing. I think it is entirely possible to be Green and not to take man made Global Warming seriously.

This especially scares me looking at the hoo-ha around Copenhagen, which seems - to me, anyway - to be moving further and further away from a rational debate about mitigating the impacts of an increasingly resource hungry world, and more and more towards a politico-industrial summit to bed down the huge amounts of money at stake in promoting techniques like Carbon Trading (which is based largely on such sensible ideas as trading CDO's - a technique which did so well for our Financial industries in 2008. Nuff said)

So whether you agree with Climate Change or not, whether you agree its man made or not, it is a very scary thing when half the debate is stifled by those who have access to power, whatever side they are on.

And for that reason, I think we have to fight for the rights of Social Media tools liek blogs tohave proper freedom of speech, to free our data, and to be logged on all search engines (never mind Net Neutrality, I want Link Neutrality)

I say this partly to provoke, of course - but it does occur to me that many in the Social Media Set just love blogs etc when they espouse the right causes but are often the first to cry for curbs to freedom of speech when they don't.

Try an experiment the next time you go to a church in Europe (or any of the main combatant nations in the First World War) and look at the In Memoriam sections for World War 1 vs World War 2. What strikes you is the huge number who died in the First vs the Second World War, for no other reason than the generals thought it was very smart to send young men walking through mud into the face of barbed wire and machine guns time and time again to make a few yards ground, to be lost when the other guys did the same.

If ever there was a starker example of why one shouldn't listen to one's betters, this was it. Poor men die in rich men's wars, they say - and this was the worst. At the time there was the most astonishing amount of pro-war jingoism being whipped up, and in most European countries anyone who argued it was a bad idea was branded a coward or worse.

So, roll forward nearly 100 years - and a question for all you Noo Meedja-ites out there. If they had Twitter or something like it in 1914, do you think it would have:

(i) Exacerbated the jingoism, with howling lynchmobs shouting at those arguing against it
(ii) Ameliorated the jingoism, with people popping up with coloured avatars in protest
(iii) Had no effect, it was merely a system that reflected the larger public mood and the governments' wanted their war anyway

If, like me, you suspect it was more probably (i) shaded with (iii) (assuming that Twitter1914 was as unmediated as today), that may give some pause for thought this Armistice Day. When all around are losing their heads, and you may lose yours if you oppose them, what do you do?

Last week I shared a podium with Bill Thompson and Peter Cochrane following a preview of the new BBC series on the emergence of the 'Net at Nico macDonald's Innovation Forum event on "The Internet - Next 40 Years" event. We have been doing some background research on the issue of Innovation in 2009 following a piece done for NESTA earlier this year on how Innovation was impacted by the Great Depression (answer: it flourished, and companies started then - Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard etc - kept on being innovative until In Search Of Excellence was written).

At any rate, another thing I looked at was the history of innovation over the last 100 years, from 1909 to 2009. If I had a hypothesis before starting it would be that there was an accelerating pace of innovation. The results - so far - tell me that is not the case, and it is probably cyclical. In fact, one could argue that innovation in 1909, 1949 and 1969 was greater than 2009.

Heresy? Well, here's some thoughts for you. I looked at Innovation along a number of areas that "move the needle" as far as changing things is concerned, and here is a quick summary of the more detailed research:

1. Transport:

The period 1899 - 1909 went from Zero to Bleriot in powered flight, from horseless carriages to model T Fords and saw the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, that was the culmination of a massive period of innovation as shipping went from wooden sailing ships to steam and steel, and from average speeds of 6 to 30 knots.

The period 1999-2009 saw the withdrawal of Concorde and the height of aerospace design being making ever bigger air buses. Land transport has seen very little significant advances since 1989 (Did you know there were probably more electric cars in 1909 as a % of cars than today) and shipping hasn't moved forward since containerisation. The speed of an omnibus through Central London has hardly changed in 100 years.

2. Communications

In the decade to 1909 moving pictures and radio were developed and telephony was the "Internet" of the era, expanding rapidly at the telegraph's expense and the first "wireless" telephony was tested.

In 2009 we are looking back at the rapid rise of broadband as high speed moved from 128kb/sec to (up to) 50 Mb/sec in the UK, faster elsewhere. A huge increase to be sure, but still roughly on a par with the jump in speed from telegraph to telephone.

3. Public Health

The 20 years to 1909 sees a concerted push on clean drinking water and elimination of major diseases via the biotechnology of the time in the "OECD". Child mortality rates halve nearly very decade going forward, average life expectancy starts to rise

The period to 2009 arguably sees a return in the "OECD" of diseases tat were being cleared up in 1909, and the major pharmaceutical companies have arguably shifted gear from solving the diseases of the many to solving the diseases of the rich, driving an increasing market in generic drugs and alternative medicines. Biotechnology and DNA based innovation continues apace, but whether it is more transformative than the work being done from the breakthroughs in chemistry and microbiology 100 years ago is debatable.

4.Utilities

In 1909, in the "OECD" Electricity is moving "into the Cloud" as generation becomes more industrialised, and is moving into the home. As noted above, water and sewage are increasingly being operated at citywide level or greater, and the consolidation of railways is nigh complete and the start of the consolidation of 6,000 telephone companies in the US is about to start.

In 2009 we see the energy focus is on "Green Energy" - but all the technologies are at least 30 years old with (arguably) little major advance in that period apart from solar energy - Wind and BioFuels in fact are still net negative energy generation technologies, and it is highly likely that much of the OECD's short term energy needs will be met from nuclear energy (a 1949 technology) or rebuilding coal based generation. Railroads are on the increase, via fast trains (first used in 1969), and water supplies in the OECD are not much advanced on 1909, but are better diffused - but in cities like London its getting worse as many of the pipes are still from the previous era.

5. Information Technology

The period around 1909 sees the formation of IBM, NCR and various manufacturers of mechanical computers (mainly for money handling).

In 2009 IT is still under the impact of Moore's Law, the integration with the internet allows it to benefit from Metcalfe's Law, and the emergence of Robotics as a seriously shape changing industry owing to the above shifts. This is the one area I looked at where the 1909 period is not showing material shift in capability.

6. The Smart Home

The period around 1909 sees the invention of electric versions of most of the domestic appliances we use today, the electric light bulb and early fluorescent lighting. The period around 2009 is seeing the first intelligent, networked domestic appliances in "smart homes" and the (legislated and not very popular) introduction of the first major step forward in light bulbs in decades. The growth in networked home security would make little sense in 1909 as security was not nearly as much an issue in the first place. In 1909 home delivery was fairly common from the butchers; bakers and candlestick makers' "boys", in 2009 online ordering/physical delivery is reversing a mid century trend towards "consumer carries".

7. Media

In 1909, Radio and Film are starting to impact the traditional media, censorship is emerging in movies due to the rise in "adult" content (all new media see major innovation from porn in their early days), and are the first big hits on the hegemony of Print media. In 2009 Web based Video and Audio is starting to impact TV and Radio, and the Internet is starting to impact Print media. In 1909 music was largely user generated round the family piano, in 2009 it is far more "user generated" than for the previous 60 years

8. Human Freedom

The 1909 period sees the organisation of labour as a pressure group and it becoming a political force, and the emergence of female emancipation as a campaign issue (the Suffragettes ring a bell?). 2009 sees Environmentalism and a form of Anti-Capitalist/Globalisation movement as the main campaigning causes. Arguably the Environment could be a bigger issue, but labour and female emancipation is a pretty impressive ticket for 1909.

We also looked at 1929 (more a period of consolidation of the turn of the century), 1949 (massive innovation during and immediately after WW2), 1969 (huge innovation spilling out from space race and Cold War (including the DARPANet) and large R&D labs like Bell, BT etc are in their heyday. 1989 again looks like a period of consolidation. I've put up above 4 of the 6 decades in an early-day "Innovation Index" slide I did for the event (1969 being a key year to look at), and I put in 1929 due to the Crunch connotations). The Index is showing innovation in each sector relative to the others decades, so green = high, red = not high. Using a simple green = 3, red =1 scale allows a rough numerical index that argues - across all the areas - we are relatively less innovative today.

Now, you can argue that in 2009 we are seeing Nano and a host of technologies, but you can also fairly easily find similar very significant breakthroughs in the similar 1889 - 1909 period (X rays anyone?). You can also argue that diffusion of innovation is far faster today, but that is - arguably - not an acceleration of innovation in itself.

So in conclusion, although we think of ourselves as the most innovative generation, Evah!, the truth is that we are not as far ahead as we would like to think, and in fact, given the comms advances we have today, it is arguable we should be a lot better at it - in fact, one could argue that some things are going backwards, and to an extent we are actually resting on the laurels of work done in the last 100 years.

Looking at why innovation may be less than it could be, we see 3 potential major trends emergent in the last 20 years:

- Risk aversion - a lot of innovation today is more about making things safer, more reliable (the positives of risk aversion) but arguably we also have far lower ambitions. Today any major scientific program inevitably hits the "we could spend this on [choose your short term cause here]" (The day I did my talk this was exactly the complaint aired on the BBC about the new Aries 5 rocket NASA launched).

- Short Termism - National and Corporate R&D has largely been racked back and there is an increasing short termist view on how money is used. In fact, in may sectors there has been more innovation in the financial side than the product side, which has often used "globalisation" as a way of avoiding unionised and minimum wage labour in "OECD" countries and outsourced work to much lower wage countries.

- IPR/Patent blockages in OECD countries slows down cycles. In the decades before 1909 the USA wilfully ignored British and European Patent rules for "Pirate Innovation", and arguably China and a few other countries are doing the same today.

Being a bit more sanguine, we see a number of social trends kicking off now, driven by the IT/Net and other drivers (the crunch, shifts in global power, economics of energy. various philosophical/religious fundamentalisms) promise to be significant in the future, so we suspect that the 2009 - 2029 period will - as the Depression did - drive major innovation

This is truly shocking - at a Yahoo! Hack Day event in Taiwan last weekend, there were Lap Dancers of the sexy, scantily clad female variety, and instead of shouting Yahoo! the Geeks were scandalised ( but not before putting up all the pictures ).

Our industry is still young. If we want an all-encompassing technology scene, we need to actively work to cultivate an inclusive environment. This means a zero tolerance approach to this kind of entertainment. Booth babes, tequila girls, and scantily clad gyrating women simply set the wrong tone, here or abroad. Heck, this isn’t just about offending women—many guy geeks I know would be mortified by this kind of thing.

(Actually, the thing that shocked me was that the Geeks noticed. In my day (said the old curmudgeon) Real Geeks wouldn't know what a girl was, never mind actually get a lap dance off one . )

OK, OK cheap jokes aside, there is this issue of making the industry attractive to more women which we alluded to yesterday, and if you want to attract women, you need a less macho industry. Simon Willison was by and large right to say what he did above.

This (Lap Hack) was over the top. There is a time and a place for everything and this wasn't it!

But at the same time, looking at some of the responses, the risk of going the other way and being all PC is that one can be a bit too pious, in that any industry with sales(men) in it will be prone to this, so one needs a bit of give and take. We dont want to invent the New Victorians either, or do we?

Chippendales, anyone?

I've been mulling over this since yesterday (for background see yesterday's post here) and have come up with 3 thoughts - in increasing "order of importance". So (ahem) here they are:

1. The penalty of Olde Worlde companies "Not Getting It" is increasing, dramatically.

This was a spectacular own goal, brilliantly sent up in the Daily Quail - here is an excerpt:

An industry analyst said: 'It's been a clever job, making great use of viral and self-facilitating media nodes. Brands are starting to realise that to really make a splash you need to go the extra mile, do something big and zany - Carter-Ruck's strategy of assaulting British democracy and raping the very concept of free speech delivered an incredible awareness boost.

However, they couldn't have done it without the Guardian. I think this demonstrates the growing importance of tightly integrated cross-platform actionplanned thoughtleader bacterial germination multi-maven campaigns.'

What is funniest is that Carter-Ruck, the legal eagles here, actually claim to be experts on handling media - from their website:

A large number of our cases attract the attention of the world's media and we are well-used to dealing with the challenges that this presents.

(and.....)

The firm's claimant practice is the largest in the country, being described in Chambers Guide to the Legal Profession as 'unsurpassed'.

Indeed......yesterday was a truly unsurpassed moment in media handling I suspect Carter-Ruck may well be thinking of employing a few "Social Media Experts" today. This episode will, I suspect, be taught in Business Schools as a case study.

2. The Mainstream Media is no longer making the running

Yesterday, the mainstream media was by and large conspicuous by its absence in the morning, the blogosphere did the heavy lifting until Carter-Luck stepped back from the Injunction on the Injunction at midday. Of course, after the event they came in en masse, and today are even harrumphing that those of us on the front line (as it were) yesterday did not do a proper job and are now celebrating prematurely (I love the whiff of sour grapeshots in the morning).

And telling us now that we "didn't get it right" yesterday and that you MSM guys knew about these super injunctions all along makes me think OK, so why the f*ck weren't you guys screaming it from the rafters then?. I read assiduously, watch news analysis programs nearly nightly, and I had never heard of this "super injunction" trend before.

I am also reminded of the days before The Crunch - I (and many other people) could feel it coming*, and I kept on looking in the papers and on TV for people writing about it, but I tell you what - I saw nary a peep about all of that in the mainstream media (most of the hard analysis was being done by people such as the housepricecrash website, Umair Haque and - well, other small cap blogs and websites). Until it happened, of course - and then suddenly the mainstream press were all over it like a rash, writing books and filling the airwaves with (often crap) analysis of barn doors and bolts.

Yesterday to me marks the official moment the MSM handed over the baton to the blogosphere, albeit kicking and screaming. And its not that they don't have the technology - they all have blgging arms now. Its about integrity, and independence. Sure - not all bloggers are independent, not all of them have integrity - but a huge number do, and that is what drove things yesterday.


3. The Mainstream Media and Parliament is too Fail to be Big, The People will have to "Do it Yourself" to maintain their freedoms for a while.

Keeping Parliamentary Freedom is Big Sh*t but pretty much until Carter Luck took away the big stick I saw neither Parliament nor the Press (with a few brave exceptions) going in to bat against them yesterday.

It has taken centuries to get what rights the citizen has today. Successive governments have been whittling away at it over the last few years, the media and Parliament have - with honourable exceptions - stood by and let this happen. In fact, I would suggest that a large proportion of their troubles today has been because of a 20 year "dumbing down" to the point of irrelevance. I can op-ed for Africa, any small cap blogger can do fashion and fluff, this we don't need large, worthy (and expensive) media organisms to do this, and come the digitisation, its no surprise that came the dis-aggregation. Ditto MP's - what value precisely does a party apparatchick who has never worked in the real world and whose place at the trough is party-given give?

And take today - the MSM is chasing down the story of a few tens of thousand pounds of overgardening that MP's may pay back - whereas the big story is the huge bonuses that the Merchant Banks are going to pay themselves this year based on the security of guaranteed taxpayer money that bailed them out from bankruptcy. Goldman Sachs is poised to pay £16bn in the UK alone - double the amount of 2008. To put that in context, £16 billion is half the annual total cost of the UK's entire defence operation - Trident, Afghanistan, men, ships, tanks, planes - the lot. It is 1/5th of the budget of the NHS for a year. Most importantly, dear taxpayer, it is your money as without y'all underwriting a still bankrupt banking system they would all be bust now.

Do you also realise that the entire panoply of George Osborne's proposed budget cuts - which are already causing wails of woe across the land, and the digging in of entrenched vested interests everywhere - only amounted at most to c £7bn. There is strong talk about soaking the taxpayer yet again (being the lender of least self organisation and thus least resistance) to pay for featherbedded public service pensions, never mind the bankers.

So who, we ask, is going to sort this all out and avoid the average (tax-paying) person being reduced to some form of post-feudal serfdom, having paid for the bankers and then paying again for the politicos?

Our Parliament? Our Press?

I don't think so, not on current form anyway. Their economics and incentives are too compromised. They are both necessary, but both need to go through radical reformation.

I suspect "We The People" will have to take matters into their own hands in the interim, or else we will be sold down the river.

The good news is that yesterday we saw what a positive impact social media, used responsibly, can have. I think there is a very big lesson there. Also, there is an election coming up - maybe it is time for the Vox Populi to set the agenda - and maintain an overwatch - rather than supinely "be done unto" in future.

I'm no Utopian - we can't use "people power" sustainably, its a change agent not a way of running things long term in my view. Some form of reformed parliamentary structure will be required, some form of media with ability and time to look into corruption, malpractice etc is essential

This will be hard, and there are a lot of pitfalls but I think we may now just have the tools to do it........ its early days, they are far from perfect and there will be errors (how do we stop "bad" mob rule for example) - but if we can fashion some form of truer democracy out of this mess, then it will be worth while.

The new technology is not the total solution by a long way, but it is part of it.

*Broadstuff is primarily a technology strategy blog, so I didn't blog much about this sort of thing - in hindsight I should have, and looking at yesterday I'm tempted to put more political and economic analysis in)

Why have SETI trying to find life in the far reaches of the universe, when you can use a similar process to create it on your own computer (been meaning to blog this for days, Artificial Life has fascinated me for years). NYT:

In October, a small team of Silicon Valley researchers plans to turn software originally designed to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life to the task of looking for evidence of artificial life generated on a cluster of high-performance computers.

The effort, dubbed the EvoGrid, is the brainchild and doctoral dissertation topic of Bruce Damer, a Silicon Valley computer scientist who develops simulation software for NASA at a company, Digital Space, based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Mr. Damer and his chief engineer, Peter Newman, are modeling their effort after the SETI@Home project, which was started by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program to make use of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in homes and offices. The project turned these small computers into a vast supercomputer by using pattern recognition software on individual computers to sift through a vast amount of data to look for evidence of faint signals from civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos.

The EvoGrid goal is to detect evidence of self-organizing behavior in computerized simulations that have been constructed to model the first emergence of life in the physical world. Pattern recognition software on home computers would seem a perfect tool.

A-Life was the original "synthetic biology" field but like AI has stayed in the background, except for Genetic Algorithms which are applied in all sorts of things from stock trading to stock control.

No posts today - the whole Broadsight crew were at TEDxTuttle running the Audio/Visual bit of the event and a bit of light emcee-ing - we've been very heavily involved in the "back end" of it all, including building the website and all the filming.

Thanks to all the speakers - Maggie Philbin, Rachel Armstrong, Lloyd Davis , Ben Walker and Mat Morrison for all their effort

Seems like a good day was had by all......Adam Tinworth has a nice series of blogs on the day, starting here.

More later, as they say.

There has always been a good game in boring corporate meetings or conferences - Buzzword Bingo. First person to count 10 Corporatese sayings wins (this got to be far more fun with IM, and a real hoot with Twitter). But that was soooooo 2008, dahlings.

Now Paul Carr has evolved the game to new heights, using the newest form of social intercourse - videostreaming - and the oldest, alcohol. The (un)inspiration was the fairly insipid (that's not inspired spelled wrong btw) collection of startups on Day One at TechCrunch50 (we were even prompted to write about Companies we wanted to see there):

The rules are simple – we start tomorrow at 9am (Pacific). Get up early, grab yourself a case of beer and then either sit in the room or, if you had better things to do with three grand, tune into the live stream and follow these simple instructions…

Take a sip when…
- Someone uses the word “freemium” or describes something as a “chicken-egg problem”.
- Someone makes a borderline misogynistic remark to the only female judge: (e.g. “That fashion company really made Marissa perk up”)
- Someone claims that their aim is to change the world.
- Someone claims that their aim isn’t to change the world.
- Someone says “that’s a great question” in response to a judge, when they clearly want to say “go fuck yourself”.

Take a swig when…
- Someone actually tells a judge to go fuck themself.
- The wifi works so well that it breaks someone’s pitch.
- Yossi Vardi forces everyone to give an awkward round of applause for absolutely no reason.
- Someone makes a joke about Michael Arrington in their pitch. (And take a second swig when that joke inevitably falls flat)
- It becomes clear to everyone that the success of a particular company would result in the world becoming a terrible, terrible place.

Drain your whole drink when…
- Two founders walk on to the stage wearing identical shirts.
- Someone sings during their pitch, or a lady starts to dance.
- Jason Calacanis alludes to his personal wealth, mentions Tesla or quotes a Disney movie when giving advice to a startup.
- Someone tries to bribe the entire room with cupcakes.

Drain your drink and chug an entire fresh one when…

- Someone tries to bribe the entire room with a car.

You're allowed to throw 'em both up if its a Toyota Pious. Oh, what......it was a Pious?. For UK readers, 9am Pacific is 5pm GMT, ie Pimms O'Clock, so a perfect time to start. For New York readers, take an early lunch for Manhattans.

Now why, I hear you ask, is a sober blog like Broadstuff giving airtime to debauched drinking games, instead of reporting on the TechCrunch50 companies. There are 2 answers to this:

(1) Hyp...I mean sober reporting of the TC50 is being done, in spades, all over the web. If anything, we should be filtering them as a service , albeit through beer goggles may not be your optimum approach

(2) Actually, we think this is more innovative than any of the companies - social media based drinking games will be a hot trend in 2010, once the bankers have crashed the economy again while making off with your bailout money, and the government is taxing your kids' future income till the pips of your unborn grandchildren squeak

Besides, If I recall correctly, the best way to spot the winner the last few years has been to spot the "startup" with huge amounts of SV in-crowd funding and corporate support already

This was all started off by Paul Carr, who wrote about 4 companies he thought should be there:

...me-focussed companies as…

DoucheBall
An evolution of the Foursquare/Dodgeball concept, designed to appeal to men who, for whatever reason, want to avoid running into any of their ex-girlfriends. Whenever a previous flame checks into a venue, an alert is pushed to the man’s phone allowing him to stay well clear until the danger has passed. Much like Foursquare, there’s a fun game element too, with badges to be won based on certain patterns of behaviour. By default, all users are awarded the “Player, please” and “Coward, grow up” badges at sign-up.

Am I Fired Or Not?
You know how it is – you have multiple freelance gigs, any of which you could lose at a moment’s notice by writing unforgivably navel-gazing columns about yourself and your friends. Combined with industry-wide budget cuts and publication closures, keeping track of who still employs you can be a full time job. But not any more! Introducing ‘Am I Fired Or Not?’ – the Friendfeed of firing; the RSS of redundancy. Simply add each new employer as they hire you, and be instantly notified when – a few weeks later – they come to their senses and remove themselves.

WhoreSquare
Sure, services like Skimlinks provide a neat way for site owners to make extra revenue by turning key words and phrases into affiliate links. But some editors are uneasy at the idea of shilling to their readers under the guise of producing impartial content. If you’re one of those editors then WhoreSquare is your perfect compromise. Simply install this free plugin and every single word on your blog will be instantly transformed into an affiliate link to my brilliant book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore. As an added bonus, every image, including your site’s own logo will be replaced with a gigantic animated gif of me holding the book, and waving. Sure, your readers are still being sold to but, trust me, they’ll thank you for it.

BlackoutCast
Heading out for a quick drink? Want to record everything you say and do after 10pm so you can play it back in the morning and remember all of the people you need to apologise to / pay damages to / add to your avoid list on DoucheBall? There’s an app for that.

In the comments, Andrew Scott added these 4:

Cuddle.net :
A site which provides a legitimate outlet for sexual harassment in the work place

Spotify :
Advice and premium content on how to give your partner acne so that your best friend stops hitting on them

Bummble :
A search and discovery service for mobile which reflects the true pain of finding anything on your phone; reducing the user to a squinting fumbling quivering wreck as they navigate small keys, small screen and awful mobile network connection

and of course Turnvox :

A middleware platform which hires a mechanical-turkesque crowd of outsourced third world countries to implement whatever you originally designed your code to do, but couldn’t ever quite get to work properly, thus enabling you to secure $200 million in VC funding.

We have a soft spot for Twatter, which asked who you were doing, not what. Will it make TC50 this year I wonder? Others missing are:

Make a Mint :
Takes your personal financial details from you and then cleans out your bank account. Registered offices in Nigeria and luxurious 5 star hotels in the Caribbean.

Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopla :
Startup with the most "double O"s in its name. Must work, right?

Radar O'Really :
Extremely real time search engine. Knows what you want to search for before you've typed it in

YouPhone :
iPhone style playout device plus YouPorn content. Truly a killer app.......

iPhony :
Be the person you always wanted to be! This App spoofs your iPhone so it looks like you are someone else rich and famous. Pulls data from the rich and famous' Twitter accounts to create realistic simulacra of them. Monetises by selling changing details of the Slebs you want to impersonate.

Any others we've missed?