Every time I come to San Francisco, I always count the number of billboards on highway 101 advertising pure-play .com companies. I use it as a straw poll to measure if we’re in a bubble or not. In 1999-2000, billboards were the way to advertise your new Internet company, almost like a vanity play. Yesterday night, driving from SFO to downtown San Francisco, I saw many telco and hardware manufacturer billboards but I only saw one from a pure-play: video search engine Blinkx.com.
Here’s a picture of it but, according to various sources, it looks like the billboard has been up for a couple of years already. So, no bubble for now! 😉
Update: the New York Times talks about a related topic, “Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again“, this morning.
Seb Provencher's Blog 
That Blinkx billboard has been there for at least 18 months (first time i noticed it), maybe longer. In other billboard news, I noticed yesterday that the Lombard street Ask.com billboard (of recent fame – see link below), has been taken down. Looks like Google won this outdoor ad showdown.
http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2007/10/05/another-goog-411-billboard/
It’s funny, I was just emailing my economics prof from Dawson about this a couple of weeks ago. IMHO, the companies with no revenue model (and probably a lot of those with an iffy advertising model) are going to come crashing down, hurting a lot of folks in the near future (read, by the end of 2008 we’ll see this happening). I just hope Praized isn’t one of them!
It’s funny, I was just emailing my economics prof from Dawson about this a couple of weeks ago. IMHO, the companies with no revenue model (and probably a lot of those with an iffy advertising model) are going to come crashing down, hurting a lot of folks in the near future (read, by the end of 2008 we’ll see this happening). I just hope Praized isn’t one of them!