Written on October 7, 2008 – 12:35 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
That is what it looks like when you watch this amazing Wii Experience at Youtube:
Well done but it doesn’t beat Dutch convenient store Hema with their pinball effects site that was launched in March 2008.
Written on October 7, 2008 – 10:58 am
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonia Webtipr
Estonian Internet-based IT equipment procurement company MarkIT, that already operates in eight Scandinavian and Eastern European markets, enters Sweden, Slovenia, Austria and Spain. The company aims to conquer whole Europe in the long run.
The idea behind MarkIT is connecting numerous local IT distributors’ stock into one online purchasing system with an immediate overview of availability and prices. It facilitates one-click centralized ordering from different IT wholesale distribution warehouses with deliveries to your doorstep usually within one business day.
There are 20 large warehouses with over quarter of a million different products avalible in MarkIT’s „catalog“, at least 50 000 -100 000 items in one country.
The system is used by more than 15 000 companies already. They no longer have to ask for multiple offers from different resellers, when in need for IT equipment. MarkIT gives a good online overview of not only what is available, but also when is avalible.
In the end of 2007 MarkIT conducted a short survey in The Baltics. More than 50 companies - among others Skype Technolgies, Tele2, Estonian Energy, Swedbank, Ernst&Young, Electrolux, PriceWaterhouseCoopers etc – were asked “Do you believe that MarkIT helps to save time and money on IT purchasing in your company?” The answer, on the scale of 1-10, was 8,99.
MarkIT is growing like crazy – last year’s turnover of about 20 million EUR will be exceeded by about 7 million EUR this year. The amount of frequenters has increased by 30 percent in one year. New annual sales target is set for 60-70 million EUR (1 billion EEK).
When asking Margus Pahtma, the marketing manager of MarkIT about the European IT stuff market, he says that despite the fact there are many resellers, he doesn’t know of any other Internet-based players with such a large scale business as MarkIT. If you know any competitors, let us know bt commenting the post.
MarkIT is a portfolio company of Ambient Sound Investments (The Skype founders) and JPF Holdings (Jaan Pillesaar, owner of Helmes).
Written on October 7, 2008 – 9:20 am
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Times are tough: the economic downturn shows its teeth. Lots of companies are feeling its bite, and some will go belly-up because of the wounds. Tech companies are not an exception. Maybe they won’t be hit as hard as the finance and banking sector, but, nevertheless, they will get bitten.
One of the companies that is playing with the fish now is JellyCloud (they are playing with the jellyfish, just to be in the family).
JellyCloud is (correction - was - may they R.I.P. now) the new reincarnation of the former ad network named Gator (renamed Claria after a while).
Gator was an 8-year old company which used to be an online vault for usernames and passwords for different sites. They also got us “accustomed to” their annoying pop-up ads (after they gathered personal details about our surfing habits without telling us). That caused them to be blacklisted as spyware and labeled a “black sheep” in online advertising (they weren’t alone, but they were among the well-known ones).
The team tried different business models: password keepers+ad network thru Gator, personalized home pages thru Claria, and now again an ad network thru JellyCloud.
It seems that they didn’t succeed in any of their attempts, so finally the company is giving up (according to Valleywag).
JellyCloud had taken several rounds of financing:
- as Claria: 40 million — from SOFTBANK America, Rogers Communications, Asia Pacific Ventures and Sand Hill Capital
- as JellyCloud: 11,5 million - U.S. Venture Partners, SoftBank, Sand Hill Capital and Cross Link Capital
Over 50 million dollars gone with the wind and about 36 employees fishing for another employer. It’s not a pleasant story, but the lesson is that there are lots of ad networks (over 400), so the market is saturated (partly because the online advertising spending was growing year by year and everyone tried to jump on the ship).
This year, it’s a different story. Financial and banking industries are among the top advertisers (especially using display ads), and their problems are reflected in the online advertising numbers.
According to CNET research firm eMarketer lowers the online ad spending forecast. It’s expected to be 23 percent this year…after it was nearly 35 percent in 2006, 25 percent last year, and dropped to around 16-17 percent for a few years. It’s expected to rise to 24 percent in 2012, when online video advertising is expected to boom amid a large economic recovery.
The Nielsen report shows that while, overall, online spending increased 11% in the first half of 2008 (compared to last year), display ad spending by financial services companies declined 6 percent. The financial services industry spent only $1.1 billion in online advertising in the first two quarters of the year, compared to $1.5 billion last year.
Apparently, JellyCloud is still hiring (according to their website).
But, I guess, they should hire a lawyer and a priest to finish up the burial.
Who’s next?
Written on October 7, 2008 – 9:09 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Are you still wondering why you should use Twitter? Maybe this beautiful little eBook will help you make up your mind. It is titled the “Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter” and you can flip through it online in a very attractive interface.
If you use Twitter you might still enjoy reading this because it mentions a few cool tools that you might not have heard about. Keep the url for the next time someone asks you why you waste so much time on Twitter. Or send it around the office so everybody knows once and for all what Twitter is and how it can help your company…
Are you on Twitter? Why not follow me and @nextweblog too?
Written on October 7, 2008 – 8:30 am
Timo Paloheimo, Next Web Finland Webtipr
Ever since I started blogging about Finnish startups about a year ago, I’ve wanted to get my hands on a list of all of them. That obviously didn’t exist, so I had to compile it myself. I’ve compiled the list from various sources, mainly my own blog and Arctic Startup. At this point the list should contain most of the Finnish web startups, but I must have missed a few. Should you know a company missing from the list, please let me know in the comments.
It was quite hard to categorize all of the startups as many seem to fall into several categories. As you can see from the list, there are a lot of startups in the Social media, gaming and mobile categories. There is a nice variety in the startups and it’s great that they have managed to find some unique ideas.
Social Networking
Social Networking, Travel
Social recommendation services
Creating and sharing media
E-commmerce
Gaming
Mobile
Personal tools
Business tools
Development services
Crowdsrourcing
Written on October 6, 2008 – 7:30 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Do you like looking at photos? Who doesn’t? Especially when they are beautifully made! So far, browsing photos has been quite boring, no matter which photo website you chose. Most of them have a linear browsing style which isn’t fun if you just want to look at pictures (if you browse for other purposes, like finding pictures for your website or buying, then the linear style is more appropriate).
I’m guessing that many readers use StumbleUpon. It lets you browse websites in a random manner and leaves room for plenty of surprises. Last.fm offers the same type of service. People like surprises, right?
Now the same concept is applied to photos by a service called Photoree. The Romanian service was launched in December 2007 and founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Racovitan (other services he established: Colegi.ro - the Romanian version of Classmates.com sold to Neogen.ro, Ghidoo.ro - a social bookmarking service like Reddit, Cafeneaua.com - an online discussion community). He’s one of the Romanian Internet pioneers creating several other services which were among the first in Romania at that time.
The service is bootstrapping so far and has several thousands users a day. But if it takes off more clearly then probably they should look for financing to grow it.
Photoree has a recommendation engine based upon your personal settings. Once you are registered you start rating pictures and the engine starts to learn your taste. It needs about 100 ratings before figuring what you like and don’t like and displays pictures accordingly.
At the time of this writing, it has over 1,000,000 pictures indexed in its database and most of them come from Flickr (using the Flickr API). Almost all are under a Creative Commons license so you could use them if you want. The owner plans to add other images repository sites like Zooomr, PicassaWeb, Devianart and maybe others as long as those sites offers an API.
One drawback of the service is that you can’t do anything unless you are registered. It would be better if they opened up a bit and let people explore without the need to register. They could also implement a cookie or session based recommendation system, which would eliminate the need for registration for that session. This could give a boost to their number of visitors. You know, it’s nice to get a sample of what you might buy..
The selected pictures are very beautiful (most seem to be HDR pictures which not everyone will like). I don’t know why, but during the period of time I had to rate 100 photos (you can’t escape that) only landscapes and women pictures were recommended to me. Is this a universal behavior of the service or the engine just guessed my taste :)? A look at the online forum proves that I was not the only one who was getting this selection.
Nudity can be turned off if you desire and I think they could serve more diversified genres, besides just landscapes and women (could become boring after a while).
During the learning period the engine keeps notifying you about how many times you have voted (you can skip some photos but the pop-up notifier will show up after a while). After you vote 100 times these notifications hopefully will go away (Oops! Even after 100 votes that pop-up still didn’t go away ot at least to come less often).
I tried to turn off the nudes but it seemed not to work (I also unsuccessfully tried to change the Current Method of showing pictures). Maybe I still have to make up those 100 ratings so I can do whatever I want after that…this rating it’s a bit of a burden, I should be able to browse pictures without any conditions if I want that. After all, it should be fun to get surprises, right? They could have a Surprise Me! page with totally random pictures being shown. Another idea is to display the number of votes I have done in real time on the browsing page so I don’t have to view the Stats page or wait for the notifier to tell me. Now, I’m just thinking about usability. Other than that, the layout is simple and clean. You don’t get lost in tons of options.
The service has very crude social networking options (no profile pics, no personal details, no sharing with friends, no messaging). You can only add a user as a contact. Sometimes the loading can be slow (I don’t know if they use some kind of caching system but if not then they should - caching the next 5 images for example and that requires some kind of prediction calculation based on what the user voted so far).
Overall, Photoree could be a good service, but it still need some more work to reach the status of StumbleUpon. I hope the developers will improve the site and make it more viral (send a picture or a bunch of pictures to a friend, send emails invites to friends using the address books from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, make it more social, etc). Otherwise, if they don’t move fast enough, somebody else with a better and faster execution could take their place.
Written on October 6, 2008 – 4:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Earlier today we were the lucky winners of the Sedo auction for TheNextWeb.com. We noticed it was for sale a few weeks ago and offered $1000 just to see if the owner would be interested in selling. Turned out that $1000 was enough to start a public auction that ended today.
Near the end of the auction we all grouped around one computer and kept reloading the page ready to bid more if the bid would increase. The last 3 minutes were extremely noisy with everybody screaming their lungs out in excitement! Luckily nobody else placed a bid and we were announced the winner by Sedo.
Here is a screenshot of the last minute. It seemed to take forever:
We will be keeping the .ORG domain name and will move to the new domain somewhere in the following month.
Written on October 6, 2008 – 2:58 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
21Ventures, a U.S. based venture capital firm, announced today an undisclosed seed investment in CogniSafe, an Israeli company providing real-time anti-cheat software solution for online games.
Cheating in online games is effectively a problem which causes significant losses to gaming companies and harms the players ability to enjoy the challenge and adventure of a cheat-free game environment.
The cheating problem in online games causes game providers to remove tens of thousands of paying players every month, due to suspected cheating. The removal is usually done following a complaint from other players, or after a post mortem analysis of player’s actions. In addition a significant number of legitimate players abandon some game titles, and cease paying, when they feel they have been cheated.
CogniSafe’s solution enables online game providers to detect, in real time, any deviation from proper gaming procedures by the online players, and remove cheaters from participation in the game, thus makes cheating attempts futile and enables other players to continue and enjoy a cheat-free gaming experience.
(Hat tip to peHUB)
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