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One of my favorite companies from the last Internet bubble, OpenTable, has filed to go public.

In this economy? Are they out of their minds?

Perhaps not. The company is marginally profitable, and its total addressable market is still largely untapped. The OpenTable reservation system is not in place at all restaurants that could benefit from it, especially those outside the United States. From a product perspective, since the system does increase the number of chairs filled in a restaurant, it's a good and proven investment for a restaurant to make.

However, this is no magic bullet to save the dining industry. Restaurant revenues overall will decline during the recession, as people strive to save money on all discretionary expenses such as dining out. Restaurants will go out of business and some will no doubt be OpenTable customers. So without a stepped-up sales push, which IPO funds could provide, OpenTable's growth would be destined to slow this year.

OpenTable benefits from a strong network effect: The more restaurants that use it, the more valuable it becomes to consumers, and thus the more potentially valuable it becomes to restaurants not yet using it. That's assuming there's no open standard for online reservations, but I haven't seen any drive toward that, and I wouldn't expect the restaurant industry to devote resources to it as long as OpenTable treats its customers well.

One could argue that investors are wary of the public market now, for good reason, and one might thus think that any company making a public offering now will generate much less cash by doing so that it would during a bull market. That is not necessarily true. As one of the few companies are currently able or willing to go public, OpenTable will get a lot of investor attention.

According to Renaissance Capital, there were only 43 U.S. IPOs in 2008, down from 272 in 2007 and 221 in 2006. The last U.S. IPO in the technology sector was Web hosting firm Rackspace (RAX), in August 2008.

There's a financial analysis of OpenTable on TechCrunch: OpenTable Files for IPO, Reveals Finances.

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As of Friday morning, technology news site Red Herring, widget start page service Pageflakes, and social bookmarking site Magnolia were all unavailable. But it appears all three will be back up and running.

Eventually.

As for Red Herring's outage, Silicon Valley Insider is reporting (via a Tweet from a former RH employee) that it's closing its doors. However, a source close to the company tell us that Red Herring simply has not paid its hosting bill, and that no employees have been informed otherwise.

In Pageflakes' case the site began experiencing problems early Thursday, which coincided with several other sites from parent company LiveUniverse going down. These sites, including LiveVideo, MeeVee, and Revver are all currently offline (which in Revver's case appears to happen a lot).

We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has "lots of servers." Greenspan also said that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.

For Magnolia, the prognosis is a little more grim. Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out. In the meantime, the service has shuttered its Web front-end and closed external access to its APIs while its database is re-organized. It should be noted, however, that the outage does not affect development on the company's open-sourced project, "M2" which opens up the site for other people to add new features and fix bugs.

The one positive thing to come out of this is learning about the execution of downtime. Magnolia was the only one of these three sites (or more if you're counting Revver and LiveVideo) that put up a notice to its users to tell them what was going on. In many cases, this keeps panic at a low, and more importantly--does not make people think you're shutting down and taking their data or content with you. There is of course a third way to do it if you are actually running out of money: hibernate.

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Microsoft's efforts to make Windows 7 less annoying than Vista may also be making it less secure than its predecessor.

With Windows Vista, the operating system popped up a warning any time a major change was being made to the system, whether by the OS or by a third-party ...

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The Super Bowl is Sunday, and undoubtedly many of you are gearing up for a big weekend filled with fun, excitement, and a Cardinals victory (yeah, I said it). Some of you might have a checklist filled with snacks and drinks you want to pick up before Sunday, but I'm here to tell you that that's not all you should have on that list. Snacks are great and drinks are better, but once your fridge is stocked, you'll want something to help you pass the time.

Be nice with Give Real
Want to be the nice person this weekend? Then sign up for Give Real and send your friends a Pittsburgh Pint or an Arizona Ale.

You log on to Give Real's site, give it your credit card information, and send a gift of beer to your friends. You can suggest a particular beer for your friends to try out and add a personal message. But it's not like the beer goes through the mail: Once the recipient gets the gift notification, they accept it by registering for Gift Real and inputting their own credit card information. When that's complete, they can buy a beer at any restaurant or bar and once that transaction posts to their account, Give Real will refund their money and take the cost of the beer out of your account.

Credit card monitoring may not sound too appealing and I wouldn't be too happy sending my credit card information to a start-up that I've never heard of, but when it comes to the Super Bowl and to beer, all bets are off.

See the past with Hulu
Hulu, the professional video content site that's backed by NBC and Fox, may have a Super Bowl ad this year, but that's not all its doing for the big game. Friday, the company announced that you can view all the commercials from Super Bowl XLII on its site.

The page features all the best commercials from the past year--55 in all--and to be quite honest, I didn't realize how entertaining many of them are. I enjoyed my 30 minutes watching all the commercials. I think you will, too.

Once you find some you like, you can also use Hulu's widget, which it unveiled Friday, that allows you to post your favorite commercials to your blog. It's a neat tool that works well.

But there's more. This year's Super Bowl will have, of course, its own commercials. And instead of just telling your friends about them Monday morning, you can actually show them which were your favorite, since Hulu will be adding each commercial to its Super Bowl page as soon as they air Sunday.

Watch even more commercials on SuperBowl-Ads.com

SuperBowl-Ads.com provides past commercials, much like Hulu does, but it goes one better: you can view commercials from Super Bowls dating back to 1998. It even has a few ads that aired earlier than that.

What's better on a Saturday afternoon when you're waiting for Sunday's game than to sit back and watch old commercials that you probably forgot about? Remember the old Budweiser commercials? They're on SuperBowl-Ads.com. So are all the GoDaddy commercials and just in case you're wondering, so is Apple's famous 1984 ad.

That said, there isn't an exhaustive collection of commercials and a bunch that I loved in the past are missing. Regardless, the site is still worth trying out.

Get your debate on with Twitter

I love all the ways Twitter is being used, and for those at Boston ad agencies or Boston University, they can use it another way: to debate which Super Bowl ads are best.

According to a report from the Boston Globe, a real-time Twitter debate will start before the opening kickoff to allow everyone in the community to pick their favorite commercials and support their opinions against others who might disagree.

Granted, the debate is being used as a marketing ploy by ad agencies that want to promote their brand, and it's only being pitched to people in and around Boston, but who cares? That doesn't mean you can't start your own debate, or crash the Boston party.

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Google released a second beta of its toolbar software for Firefox that gives the browser a prominent feature of Google's own Chrome.

In Chrome, when you open a new tab, the browser displays a page with up to nine miniature versions of pages you visit often--a selection of what you've shown to be your collective home page. The new beta version of Toolbar 5 does the same for Firefox, including not just the miniature pages, but also the list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs that Chrome shows.

There are still no ads, though, which I wonder about given Google's new interest in improving its profitability.

According to Google toolbar programmer Sergey Ryazanov's blog post on the subject, you can select the specific pages you want, and none of the information is sent back to Google.

I've found the new-tab behavior of Chrome handy, especially when I first launch the browser. It presents me with nine pages, and I middle-click on the ones I happen to want at that particular moment. It's still probably not enough for me to install the toolbar, though, since I hate bloat and the lost real estate of browsers. And Firefox can be set with multiple-tab home pages anyway.

Ryazanov warns that the feature doesn't work with Firefox 2 and may conflict with other Firefox extensions. It's curious he didn't mention Chrome in the post, though, especially given how proud Google is of its Chrome user interface research.

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I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that's worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you're currently on.

It works remarkably well--at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page. This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit.

What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb's index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site's standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate.

There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit. For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar. You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser's address bar.

SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you'll like. Combined with this you'd get another avenue of exploration.

Here's an explanatory video from the site's about page. Worth noting is that you don't need to have your volume on.

SimilarWeb 3 from Similar on Vimeo.

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Yahoo plans to discontinue its Briefcase service, which allows people to store files online for free.

The service will be shut down on March 30, the company said Wednesday. Yahoo is warning users to retrieve or delete their documents before that date.

Briefcase, which offered 30MB of online storage, was launched almost 10 years ago. However, "usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities," the company said in a statement.

There are now many alternative online storage services to Briefcase. Notable rivals include Microsoft's SkyDrive, a Windows Live service that offers 25GB of free storage.

There are also signs that Google may be preparing a free online storage product called GDrive. Recent reports have pointed to a reference to GDrive in an online, recently updated file associated with its Google Pack bundle of free software, which includes Chrome and Picasa. The file text says that GDrive "provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents [and] allows you to access your files from anywhere, any time and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or mobile phone."

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

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Microsoft has confirmed that it won't issue a second beta of Windows 7, saying that the next test version of the operating system will be a near-final release candidate.

Windows engineering head Steven Sinofsky announced the move in a blog posting on Friday, ...

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Yedda, a social answers service, announced that it has celebrated its first anniversary with AOL since its acquisition in 2007. Coupled with that announcement, the company released its most popular queries of 2008. It determined that the most inquired topics of the year were the presidential election, and the "Zac Effron vs. Robert Pattinson hotness" debate. President Obama's 30-minute infomercial spawned 1,800 answers, while Sarah Palin's nomination speech collected 1,880 responses. The favorite movie of the year, based on Yedda's findings, was The Dark Knight.

Fotolia, a company that provides and sells stock photos, announced Friday that it has brought video to its site. According to the company's executives, they've built technology for the site that will allow them to accept, inspect, and sell footage on behalf of videographers and filmmakers. Those who wish to buy the videos will receive them for a single fee. After the transaction is made, consumers can use the videos however they see fit. The maximum resolution available is 1,920x1,080. Clips will be priced between $10 and $50, depending on the resolution.

Online video platform, Joost, announced Friday that its iPhone and iPod Touch application has been downloaded more than a million times at the Apple App Store. The free app hasn't set any records by reaching 1 million, but the company's representatives were quick to point out that Joost is ahead of other video delivery apps in the market.

Sports game developer Play Hard Sports announced that it has signed former NFL coach Bill Cowher to provide color commentary for its upcoming Flash Football game. The company also announced that it's changing its name to Quick Hit. The game will track stats and records and feature a social community where players can interact. It's expected to launch in time for the 2009 NFL season.

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It's rare that you get Chad Hurley, co-founder of the Google-owned YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, on a panel together. But they were on Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and we tuned in via Webcast.

Not surprisingly, neither Hurley nor Zuckerberg dropped any bombs. They've been trained in the ways of the Force, after all. But here's what they said in response to the panel's final question for them: where do they see their companies being in five years?

Also not surprisingly, both founders expressed confidence that, yes, their companies would be around. Hurley's answer was basically that YouTube has become so ingrained in digital culture that it's here to stay. "We've seen people expressing their thoughts, sharing their experience," he explained. "We have the Queen (of England) on our site, we have the Pope on our site, we have the White House on our site." YouTube was also acquired for $1.65 billion by Google, so its future is decently stable.

He was more coy when it came to the question of whether he would still be at YouTube in five years. Hurley's answer was simply, "Life is short."

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, put forth the argument that Facebook solidified its survival by two things: staying in touch with what kinds of information people want to share, and being willing to evolve to fit that; and second, launching its third-party developer platform to establish itself as more than just a standalone service.

"Any individual application, yeah, probably will kind of grow and fade over time," Zuckerberg said. "Facebook will always be this hub where we've mapped out who people know, and where people are going to share information." The platform, he said, is open and flexible enough to satisfy the digital world's "constant need for new, more efficient applications."

We admire their optimism--but let's see what the markets have to say about it.

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