New Golden Age for Outside-the-Box Startups?

jg21 writes "A brief essay on the SOA Web Services Journal claims there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'. The piece claims that we're entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need. On example given is VOware like Groove, which is likened to IM on steroids. From the article: 'The ingredients for another wave of new companies are all around us - pervasively all around us. They include new wireless extensions of the wired network and the further exportation of technologies such as XML.' Intriguingly optimistic."

Comments

I love the department name

[K.B.Zod]

It certainly could be the beginning of the next bubble. Joel Spolsky doesn't think much of the "Web 2.0" hype, which I think this article may be buying into.

The bit in the article about how XML will solve all our data interchange problems is particularly curious. C'mon, it's just text files with a bunch of angle brackets, when it gets right down to it.

But who do we sue?

[G4from128k]

Sound like this might creates some apoplectic lawyers. If a company lasts only a few months, it's going to be a difficult target for lawsuits. By the time the plaintiff finds a lawyer or the case goes to court, the company is gone.

I suppose you can go after the principals, but if most of the money came from (and went to) a set of legally-insulated investors (e.g., in an LLC), then the managers of the company won't be the deep pockets that lawyers love. Can a dissolved entity be reconstituted (and money taken back from investors) if that company is later found liable for something?