Talk about a story celebrating 20-20 hindsight: Bloomberg has a story looking at Vonage's controversial IPO, its post-IPO troubles (lawsuits, analyst downgrades. tumbling stock price, etc.) and co-founder Jeff Citron's "colourful history". Perhaps the highlight of the story is this quote:

"I don't even know how the company went public,'' said Mark Mowrey, an analyst with Al Frank Asset Management, whose firm's $850 million in funds includes shares of Verizon and AT&T. ``With big companies trading at the valuations they're trading at, I don't know how an upstart that's stolen customers from them and has no defensible business model should be valued more highly.''

If every investor was as smart as Mowrey, Vonage might have had a difficult time doing the IPO at $17 a share. But the market works in strange and mysterious ways. For more insight into Vonage's prospects, check out my column this week in the Financial Post.

A few months ago, I wrote about a post about a European Web site called Stardoll, which lets visitors - mostly young girls and women - virtually dress-up more than 320 dolls, including "celebrities" such as Ashley Simpson, Eminem and Rihanna. The company, which makes money from Google AdSense and a premium non-ad service, had just raised $4-million from Index Ventures (Skype, FON), which struck me as, well, different. Anyway, Om Malik has a post that Sequoia Capital Partner has made an investment. At first blush, you can't help but blurt out "venture capital in an online dress-up site?" but given my daughter's addiction to Barbie.com, it would foolhardy to dismiss Stardoll. If VCs are willing to pump millions of dollars into the company, it must be attracting some serious traffic and click-throughs. The question is how the effectiveness of the AdSense activity if much of Stardoll's users are kids. Then again, young people do have lots of buying influence.
Update: According to Alexa.com, Stardoll ranks 2,050th and it has attracted an average of 10.7 views per user over the past three months.