Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon at The Next Web Conference in 2008.
One of the hot companies here in San Francisco is not a start-up but a well established company who launched a new service that almost every new hot start-up seems to rely on. I’m talking about the Amazon Web Hosting services.
The May issue of Wired magazine features an interesting story about the ideas behind offering this service and Amazon’s vision for the future. One quote from Jeff Bezos I liked:
‘You don’t generate your own electricity, why generate your own computing?’
Today Amazon announces that they will lower the cost of their hosting platform even further. As they explain: ‘We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.’ Here are the old and new prices:
Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Unfortunately data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates which is kind of a bummer for European companies thinking of switching to Amazon S3.
With the new pricing structure some clients will be able to save as much as 26% of their monthly bandwidth fees.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 23, 2008 – 3:55 pm Eric Bun, business innovation consultant
At present, more and more companies are trying to achieve an authentic customer experience. However, it seems that the term ‘customer experience’ is getting a rather consultancy and marketing selling point; only a few parties have a real understanding of what authentic customer experience means and succeed in building such experience. Customers are in contact via different channels and companies should therefore build an authentic cross-channel experience instead of merely focusing on the online WOW experience. (more…)
Written on April 23, 2008 – 8:02 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We love scoops and we know you do as well. So here’s one: Swiss RSS service Dixero is going to launch tomorrow. Yet another RSS service, you ask. Yes! But this one is doing something new. It allows you to aggregate your favorite feeds and moreover, it transforms posts into audio by using different computer-generated voices. That means you can put the latest post of this blog on your iPod and listen to the audio version while traveling or working out. How time-saving and efficient is that?
Luca Mascaro (ceo Dixero.com) & Dafne Gobbi
One little doubt here though: will the technology behind Dixero manage to recognize names, especially the weird 2.0 ones like blurb? I mean, the idea of the service sounds good, yet if I only get non-understandable audio files I won’t use Dixero.
So according to chief strategy officer Lucas Mascaro and Dafne Gobbi we can test that out tomorrow. They’ve traveled all the way from Lugano, Switzerland to launch the service under the eyes of the Web 2.0 attendants. For now, watch this informative video featuring Luca:
Update: Frederic Martin left a comment saying this kind of service already exists. Check it out.
Dania & Gregory Gerhardt from Amazee.com at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco
In 12 days Switzerland-based Amazee will launch in open beta. We met the founders, Dania and Gregory Gerhardt, at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where they are very actively promoting their start-up. The service they aim to deliver is a simple site which allows people to work on projects that need more than one person to achieve their goals. They can set goals, invite people to join them and share their projects.
This isn’t a standard project management software but more of a platform for people who want to reach certain goals and need a tool to make that possible. The goals can be as simple as ‘Clean my house’ or as difficult as ‘Change our school system’. Unlike many other project management services Amazee is being built to do serious as well us fun projects and not really aimed at the corporate project manager.
Have you ever had a goal which required the attention and engagement of more people than just yourself? Then you are on the right platform. Amazee is a free platform that allows you to state your goals and gives you the tools to connect with like-minded people to run and promote projects. Whatever your goal is, publicize and pursue it on Amazee!
Think about your life’s goals the small and the big ones. They are an expression of your personality and they indicate to the world where you are heading for. Show them. Achieve them.
They visited Robert Scoble who made this video of Dania explaining the project:
Dania was kind enough to share 50 invites with us to give to our readers. Digg this post, leave a comment and I will personally email you an invite.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:51 am Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
Today the Twitter founders and the Twitter team from Digital Garage announced via a live streamed press conference that it is launching its Japanese language version of Twitter. Digital Garage have been working on the Japanese market introduction of Twitter to develop a Japanese language version of the popular microblogging platform. This is the first time that Twitter will be available in a language other than English.
Japan has taken to Twitter at a ferocious rate, with Tokyo being the largest origin city for Tweets in the world (twice that of second placed San Fransisco and New York) using the previous English-only version. The number of Japanese users is growing at an accelerated rate already within the tech savvy community and it is expected that the Japanese version will give an additional boost as it can now support mainstream users. The local language distribution of online platforms has traditionally been a key point to growing larger sites in the Japanese market, with services such as Yahoo and Google blossoming only after they offered the Japanese verison.
The fear however is that Twitter is popular because it is foreign and users feel they are cutting edge because they are using a product that is cutting edge enough to not have been translated yet.
The Japanese Twitter will also have another first. It will be the first time that Twitter displays advertising within the Twitter page. When you switch to Japanese language, you will see an ad panel above your sidebar.
Initial reaction in the Japanese Twitter community is a lot of chatter but a lukewarm response to the advertising and a good dose of criticism about the quality of the translation.
This is a first release though, so I will reserve judgment. What will be telling is how fast the Japanese user base grows from here.
Whatever Company is about to launch an Enterprise 2.0 search tool called knowledgeplaza.net. Right now they are showing a teaser site with some interesting content until they launch. What is different about the search engine is that it will index all employee information within a company and use that to deliver everybody within that company useful search results. The goal is to captivate the companies hidden information and knowledge and making it accessible.
There have been many more or less successful attempts to do similar things in the past including solutions from Google and Microsoft that promise similar results. It wasn’t exactly clear to me (by just reading the information on the teaser site) how this will be different from current offerings but this is what they explained to me via email:
“Imagine a large bank customer using Knowledge Plaza; (internal) experts bookmark websites of relevance, tag them according to sector, etc. (so far, it bears some resemblance to del.icio.us or Cogenz.com in the enterprise space) Knowledge Plaza allows to instantaneously build a custom *search engine* on those very sites, a perfect exemple of “less is more”: information is more relevant than a similar Google search, because your search is run through only a few hundred of pages, out of a few dozen sites hand-picked by your (expert) colleagues, not through billions of pages, with a global PageRank.
Knowledge Plaza really puts the ’social’ into “enterprise search”, and it’s something that may allow it to jump past larger players in the enterprise search field.”
The company was founded by Olivier Verbeke and has raised close to a million euros in funding so far. The enterprisesocialsearch.com site is meant as a ‘teasing’ campaign only with the actual service launching soon on knowledgeplaza.net.
The slideshow explaining this new service is currently very popular on SlideShare (‘Slideshow of the Day’) which is understandable because it is fun to watch: (more…)
Written on April 22, 2008 – 9:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Nick Gonzalez, former TechCrunch blogger who used to sleep over 3 nights a week at Arrington’s, just told the crowd at the “Intro to Blogs & Social Media Marketing” Web 2.0 Expo session what he considers to be THE best TechCrunch post ever. Well, this is the legendary article:
The honor goes to Duncan Riley, who wrote a post about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. According to Gonzalez, it’s not just the best post because it has more than 1000 comments. No, the main reason is that it brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.
Here’s what Arrington said about this spectacular event:
The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post.
So in terms of traffic Gonzalez is obviously right. Yet I think that when it comes to blogging, quality is more important than quantity. That’s why I prefer one of Arrington’s editorials to be the no. 1 TechCrunch post ever..
Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:40 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here at the “Free Traffic, Search Engine & Social Media Optimization” Web 2.0 Expo session, social media expert and famous guest blogger at several influential blogs Muhammad Saleem talks about social media optimization. Most of what he tells is pretty basic and informative - start a campaign on Sunday night -, but I like his overall message the most: it’s about love and appreciation people! Here’s my interpretation of what he said.
Everybody on the web seems to be eager for some attention, but the best way to get some is to grant other people attention. For starters, write an evergreen post about your specialism. For example a Howto ebook about your hobby or profession that will remain interesting for a couple of years. As soon as people link to this quality content, show that you appreciate this and link back to them by saying: this blog picked up my news, read here what the blogger has to say about it. Or allow trackbacks. Other visitors will notice that it pays off to link to you, and start linking as well. Before you know it, you’ve started one big attention love chain.
One remark that goes hand in hand with the love-thought is that you have to be genuine. Of course you can act like you dig the social media revolution and that you’re oh-so open and honest. Yet if you don’t mean it, the savvy users will be able to look beyond your facade. Also, writing beautiful and spectacular headlines on social bookmarking sites is ok and truly effective, yet you have to deliver on the promise.
So if you haven’t yet: change your mindset before you enter the world of social media. Put some effort in relationships, reward active visitors and content-creating colleagues and participate in conversations and enjoy the attention.
We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.
One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.
Yesterday Boris and me visited a pre-Web 2.0 Expo meet-up, organized by Flickr and blurb. We were welcomed by Robin Goldberg, she is the SVP Marketing and Business Development of blurb. After a drink, she pitched the service, and we were pretty impressed - despite the hideous name of the service.
The San Francisco-based company celebrates the good ol’ books by allowing anyone customizable photo-orientated books. It launched in October 2007 and differ from competitors like Lulu with the ultra-slick look of the books. Goldberg: “Whenever I tell people about our product, they react positive. Yet when I show them the books they get really enthusiastic”. I can see why, since the books I saw yesterday reminded me of the photo books I’d seen earlier at bookstore Borders. They’re also equally expensive with prices ranging from 12,95 to 159,95 dollar. By downloading their software program, making a book becomes pretty easy.
A Blurb book
Cool features are importing your Flickr pics and blog posts. You can either print a book to caress your beloved Flickr pics or sell your work for profit in the online bookstore of Blurb.
Blurb has just opened a European office - with a printer - in Amsterdam. So the service becomes more accessible for us Europeans.
I like this service as it gives you an opportunity to turn your online content into a touchable project. Some photographers are working daily on a beautiful collection of photos on Flickr, yet what will be left of that in 30 years? When creating a book, these photographers can show their work to their grandparents as well as their (future) children and at the same time own a gorgeous product.
I’m thinking of creating a book yearly, to capture the highlights and remember them in a rather fashionable way.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:59 pm
Written on April 23, 2008 – 3:55 pm
At present, more and more companies are trying to achieve an authentic customer experience. However, it seems that the term ‘customer experience’ is getting a rather consultancy and marketing selling point; only a few parties have a real understanding of what authentic customer experience means and succeed in building such experience. Customers are in contact via different channels and companies should therefore build an authentic cross-channel experience instead of merely focusing on the online WOW experience.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 8:02 am
Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:51 am
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
