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The team at Listicles rounded up the most notable celebrity dot-com startups


Acts of Charity:
  • Make it Right NOLA: This project to rebuild affordable and environmentally sound homes in devastated areas of New Orleans was spearheaded by Brad Pitt, and the first of its 100+ homes were finished late last year.


  • Donors Choose (Stephen Colbert): Proving that he's not all satiric talk (show host), Colbert joined the board of directors of this school-funding site that lets teachers request materials needed in their school so that donors can pick exactly what project (big or small) their money goes to.



  • Make The Difference Network (Jessica Biel): Founded by Biel, her dad and a "charity evangelist," MTDN operates on the same model as Donors Choose, allowing those in need to post the details of their projects for donors to browse and pick the cause they want to support.



Miscellaneous:
  • Kanye Travel (Kanye West): It's exactly what it sounds like, but not much more: a standard travel website with a Kanye West makeover. We're hoping this will one day merge with his blog so that Kanye can give us rental car fares IN ALL CAPS.



  • WuChess: If you know much about The RZA you'll have heard that he's a chess nerd, a powerful chess nerd capable of creating his own online chess empire, which is exactly what he's done with Wu Chess.



  • Lexicon Digital (David Caruso): The site of this Caruso-backed digital communications company is so poorly designed that we can't even tell what it does, or how Caruso is involved. From an interview at CES 2008, we glean that it has something to do with combining telecommunications and entertainment, but that's all we've got. Meanwhile the a music video/vignette/ad/whatever on Lexicon's homepage is not entertaining and communicates nothing. So we'll show you seven minutes of Caruso's CSI one-liners instead:


  • The Greg Brady Project (Barry Williams): What initially seems to be Williams's blog about his time as Greg on The Brady Bunch is actually a Brady paraphernalia store, a video-sharing site, a mostly Brady-themed blog written by a largely arbitrary group of people (including Bob Hunt, an elementary school teacher in Ohio), a charitable organization partnered with Smiles Change Lives, and a social networking site that lets users surf Facebook, MySpace and the like from within the Greg Brady Project (what?). Basically, it's like a multi-headed hydra beast that does everything the celebrity start-ups above do, with an extra touch of Brady.



  • Honorable Mention: Wikiality is the internet outgrowth of the Colbert Report (though not officially associated with the show) based on "truthiness" that basically operates like a user-generated version of The Onion.



Now-defunct:
  • Wayout TV (Damon Wayans): One of the Wayans brothers (you know, the one that was in Major Payne) tested the chilly startup waters with comedy site Wayout TV. His sketches, which ranged from bland to bland and offensive, got a healthy amount of publicity in early 2008. A sketch called "Abortion Man" upset enough viewers that YouTube pulled sponsors' ads. Within months, the site was absorbed by Wayout's YouTube channel before that was also abandoned by Wayans.



  • Y Fly (Nick Lachey): The 98 Degrees-vet-that-could launched this entertainment-centric social network in 2006, recruiting a few celebrity pals to sign up. Unfortunately, the staggering star power of Fat Joe and Ashley Parker Angel wasn't enough to generate traffic and the site was shut down.





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