Nothing like a fluffy New York Times story about the success of low-cost Web start-ups such as Meebo to stoke the entrepreneurial fires. Apparently, all it takes is a couple thousand dollars and you're off to the races. If it was only that easy! Addendum: Just to be clear, getting a start-up off the ground can be done fairly inexpensively if you've got an idea and a pretty good programmer or two to develop the service. Then, you put the cool service/widget/product on some cheap servers, issue a standard 'hey, we just launched our beta' press release, and pray to the Web 2.0 gods that TechCrunch somehow deems you worthy of coverage. Sometimes, you win the lottery with this formula (Flickr, YouTube, Digg) works but it's not so easy or so cheap for the rest of us. Truth be told, getting a service created is only half the battle; selling and marketing it continues to be huge challenge even in this low-cost Web 2.0 environment. Why? Well, gaining attention and convincing customers to actually purchase your product/service/widget is difficult and expensive because competition is intensive. The ability to create a cool Web service for next is nothing is fine - except there are dozens of other entrepreneurs who can follow the same recipe as well. So what's the bottom line? It's relatively cheap and easy to get in the race but winning can be an expensive proposition.