[Disclosure: Paul Grim’s firm, SunBridge Partners, invested in Eclipse Aviation, and this article is in part to explain why he thought this made sense, despite lots of people who thought he was nuts at the time. With dozens of companies offering copycat mobile or Web 2.0 technologies lately, his perspective about alternatives is welcome.]

Although there certainly has been no dearth of opining on the problem of copycat, flipmeat Web 2.0 companies and the VC’s that prop them up, it still seems to be the order of the day in the VC blogosphere that this is where deals get done. It is almost understandable, given the struggle to get decent returns in more capital-intensive sectors; most semiconductor and telecom deals take a bare minimum of $40m to really get going, and that assumes you don’t get caught in the crossfire of standards wars. So what else is there beyond the next mobilesocialnetworkphototaggingRSSRubyonRailsP2Padserverplatform?

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