Even if the cost of building Web 2.0 products is cheap, effectively distributing them in the marketplace is a significant challenge because of the competition… Proponents of the notion that Web 2.0 businesses are cheap to build fail to distinguish the difference between the costs of building the product and building a viable company around a product.

So, even though you have spent a serious number of hours in your dorm room perfecting your “next big idea”, chances are that’s not enough. There are many ways to get funding, but the most high profile way to do it is by pitching to any of the top venture capitalists. That’s where the big money is, despite the chance of hopefuls actually getting funded being a dismal 1%.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch recently talked to some VC partners to ask what they like to see when startups pitch their ideas. Essentially, it’s all about “structural change”. The partners say you’ll get a batter chance of getting funded if your idea relates to and takes advantage of:

• Ascent of the mobile web
• Merging of cyberspace and real space
• The decline of the firm and the rise of one-to-one commerce
• Unified identity (across different sites and services)
• Generational shift (to a more tech-savvy user base)
• Global growth of the web
• Atomization of content
• Hyper-targeting of advertising
• The coming of human-friendly interfaces
• Cloud computing

Does your idea fit this checklist? Well, good for you.

A caveat: what they don’t say, of course, is that you also need to have the right connections to even be considered, much less taken seriously. Then again, that’s how it is with most things in this world. I dream of a Web 3.0 that doesn’t need VCs (or at least, not much), where ideas can be readily deployed in the open, and the people decide on their merits and usefulness. The end-users choose, not the gatekeepers.

New domain zones. No longer limited to “.com,” “.gov” or “.net,” companies may opt to purchase “.dell”, “.google”, “.apple” and so on – something that may cause a mad dash at the registries. In a marketing perspective, may be a potential gold mine.

ASCII and IDNs. The proposal grants the use of new ASCII (”.at&t”) and foreign characters (e.g. Cyrillic in Russia) for International Domain Names (IDNs), unlike the current system that only allows characters from the Latin alphabet. This is to give people more choice and gives a big boost for localized content.

From previous studies conducted, experts found no serious technical hurdles to implement the proposal. The biggest hindrance will probably be financial, as prices for some of these new specialized domains can be steep. While there are no solid figures yet, sources say the costs may range from US$30,000 to $50,000. I’m sure Google won’t mind it, though. Whether the cost of current domain names will suffer a huge drop as a result of these changes, we shall soon see.

If you’d like to read more on it, visit ICANN’s New gTLD Program page.

2. Twitter Groups. Ordinarily, your published tweets are sent to all your followers. However, there are times when we want only certain people to read certain updates. For example, random musings only to close friends, while work-related stuff to clients. Twitter Groups makes this possible by allowing you to organize your followers to certain categories, and send targeted tweets to each.

3. Tweet Volume. It’s a great and simple way to measure the popularity of a brand, a person, or a certain product on Twitter. TweetVolume counts the number of times a word or a phrase has appeared in tweets. Right now the data covers everything from the time Twitter started, but the site has plans to include an option for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly counts in the future.

4. Tweet Scan. Going a step further than Tweet Volume, Tweet Scan is a search engine for Twitter. It’s useful to see what people are saying about you or anything else of interest (like your competitors). You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.

5. Twitter PollDaddy. Want to know whether people prefer the iPhone over Blackberries? Omelets over pancakes? The possibilities are endless. PollDaddy enables you to easily conduct surveys through Twitter. All you need is a short question and a list of potential answers. This allows you to get a feel for the people’s pulse, and can be an invaluable tool for your business.

6. Twitter Feed. As tweets are really just another way to publish updates, Twitter Feed is a handy way to incorporate Twitter posts to blogs. It gets content from any site that supports RSS feeds and automatically places the link in your twitter account. A lot of people are already doing this manually anyway to get traffic, so Twitter Feed should make things easier.

7. Twit Response. If you have any time-sensitive announcements, TwitResponse will let you write them and publish them later. The means to hold this information until they’re ready is very important in some businesses where timing is everything, especially in dealing with events, holidays, and product launchings.

Do you know any other helpful Twitter business tools? Please share them on the comments below.

In the UK, the picture is pretty much the same with Google getting an even bigger piece of the pie at 87.30%. Yahoo, MSN and Ask had to settle for 4.09%, 3.72% and 3.07%, respectively. The sample size this time was 8.4 million UK users.

All this Google dominance, which apparently is still on the rise, is sure to pack more ammunition for Icahn in his bid to merge Yahoo! and Microsoft. Even if it ever pushes through, their total search engine usage still doesn’t amount to half of what Google gets. It will take superhuman effort for them to even come close. That, or a huge boo-boo on Google’s part. Microsoft must be praying hard for Murphy’s Law.

7. Use SIFR. If you only need Flash for a few text enhancements such as headings, quotes, callout texts, and other similar uses, a technique called Scalable Inman Flash Replacement is perfect. SIFR gets text from an HTML document and render the text in Flash with a certain font. It’s great for highlighting important parts of the site, and since content and navigation is still in HTML, bots will have no difficulty indexing the page. It should be noted that SIFR is limited to simple text and cannot be used for more complicated Flash animations, which would work better with SWFObject and UFOs.

8. Play fair. As time goes on, Google will track and clamp down on suspicious codes like JavaScript redirects, cloaking, and doorway pages. Don’t get yourself banned just to get a leg up. Create good content and design a page well. What your users see should reflect what the spiders read when they crawl your site.

9. Track and improve. Search engine algorithms change all the time, and so you cannot rest on your laurels. Monitor the progress of your site’s ranking and modify your techniques depending on your observations. Conduct your own experiments and who knows? You make be able to develop neat Flash tricks of your own.

2. Minimize. Instead of creating a site wholly from Flash from content to navigation, use it sparingly for parts that really need rich media presentation. This makes the site spider-friendly, and gives it wider accessibility by allowing users of older browsers to view it.

3. Give options. A great way to extend the concept in #2 is to have an HTML version of the website available. Aside from the advantage of being able to circumvent any Flash compatibility issues, regular HTML pages usually load faster, making it ideal for visitors with slow connections.

4. Title tag. Your content may be hard to reach, but the crawlers can still read your title tags, so make good on them. Write them to be as keyword rich as possible, especially for the first 65 characters including spaces. This is the only part of the title relevant for the Googlebot.

5. Entice clicks. Once your page lands in the Google search results, it will be shown with a short description or snippet from the page. Be sure to write something in 155 characters or less that will instantly appeal to reader to click the link. While Google itself doesn’t, other search engines utilize this text for site ranking, and therefore keywords should be carefully placed within it.

That’s it. Your site is targeted for your country. Note that this setting will only be in effect if the person searching chooses the “Search pages from [country]” option on the Google homepage. Otherwise, your site may still be found by users worldwide. Try it and see the results over time. If you want to revert to your previous settings, just log back in to Google and do some quick editing.

Think out of the box. Look at what’s out there and expand them to other possibilities. There’s always something you can improve on, something missing that you can fill the gap if you look hard enough. Your widget’s uniqueness will get you noticed more quickly, and being among the pioneers in a certain segment increases your credibility and popularity.

Make it interactive. Static widgets get tiresome easily. Yours should not only look good, it should be functional and/or entertaining. Examples are mini-games and those that offer a form of service to the viewer, like navigation, weather, and the like.

Size matters. Different web pages are designed differently. To attract the most number of web owners to install your widget, it helps to provide them with a variety of sizes that they could choose from. This allows them to have more freedom for placement, similar to Adsense.

Test and follow up. Before deployment, test, test, test, and test! Invite other people for beta testing because you might be prone to familiarity blindness. Once out there, don’t rest on your laurels. Get feedback and make continuous improvements.

Just a click away. Getting your widget should be as painless as possible. It’s not the best idea to ask people to sign up to your newsletter just to get your widget, unless you’ve already become popular and it is THE widget everybody wants. For startups, your primary goal is to scatter the seeds.

Promotion. There are approximately 20,000 widgets out there. That’s still fairly low in comparison to the number of blogs and social network profiles, but it is a sizeable competition. Putting your branded widget out there does not guarantee immediate results. You still have to promote it either via your chosen social network’s channels (user groups and such) or blogs related to its function and niche market. With a little creativity and luck, you’ll be on your way to climbing the widget charts.

1. Link Bait – The content on your site should be stuff that’s interesting and/or useful, the type that other people would want to link to and share with their friends. There are many ways to do this: having a blog on your site, offering free white papers, gathering breaking news, how-to articles, pictures, videos, statistics, and collections of multiple resources and tools.

2. Others First Policy – A common mistake rookies commit (including myself when I was starting out), is that they submit their own content to social media sites exclusively, right from the start. That’s a no-no. Build your reputation first as a source of great sites within the communities of these sites. Digg or Stumble other people’s content. Only when you get yourself a sizeable following should you start submitting your own.

3. Presentation – Now when you send other people to your site, make sure they’ll like what they see. Great content badly presented will not be terribly effective, negating all your hard work. So, make sure your ads, if any, don’t clutter up your pages. Check for the site design’s compatibility to major browsers and screen sizes. Add life to your pages by including relevant images. To make reading easier for your visitors, break the content down to sections and highlight the titles.

4. Buttons – All the popular social bookmarking sites have their own little buttons you could put at either the top or bottom of your post. If you’re using Wordpress or some other CMS, make them part of your template.

5. Discuss – Social media sites have their own groups and forums. Try to join the discussions on topics related to your site. If there are questions you can answer, by all means offer your take on things. This helps to boost your ranking among the community. In forums that permit it, you can put a link to your site on your signature.

6. Reciprocate – If someone Diggs your article or posts it on a forum, write a thank you note to that person. If he or she has a blog, try to see if you like any of the entries and return the favor. You can also ask if this person wants to exchange links, which is mutually beneficial for climbing the search engine rankings.

How do you become a power user?

1. Observe. Choose your preferred social bookmarking site and particular niche, then subscribe to it. The more specific the category, the better. Get a feel for the trends. Know what works and what doesn’t.

2. Keep ahead. Also, subscribe to the top blogs or sites related to your niche. Your RSS reader should have at least 20 of those. Some of these are probably among the most dugg sites already.

3. Branding. Join the site using a short catchy username, and an equally memorable avatar.

4. Get personal. Go to the Upcoming section and try to digg the ones you think will make it to the top. More importantly, be the first one to add comment of support. Add them as friend and check their profiles constantly to digg their other submissions. If you do this, they’ll most likely return the favor.

5. Test. Once you’ve accumulated about 50 friends or so, start digging posts from your own blog, one at a time. Don’t spam or you’ll get banned. Only your best posts should be dugg. See how much diggs you can get automatically, and how close you can get to Digg’s homepage. You might need to ask a little help from your friends first so that they know about your site. If you fall short of the number of diggs needed, just go back to #4 and expand your network. Remember, it’s all about being social.