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Written on May 13, 2008 – 4:21 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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During Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs called upon all media companies to look at the bright side of the digital revolution: “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore lose sight.” I couldn’t agree more with this man. So I was happily surprised when David Petherick mailed me an example of a newspaper that seems to get what’s going on in their industry. The Liverpool Daily Post, a regional newspaper, is using CoveritLive to live blog the production of tomorrow’s paper:
Over the next 17 hours, members of our team will be logging on to this blog to talk about what they doing, and how the Liverpool Daily Post is put together.
Editor Mark Thomas, deputy editor Alison Gow, news editor Andy Kelly, sports editor Richard Williamson, business editor Bill Gleeson and features editor Emma Johnson are involved with this unique experiment and will write a story for the paper about their experiences as well. So why are they doing this?
It’s an attempt to get our online readers more involved in what we do on a daily basis.
Sounds good and daring. And I must say, I’m impressed by the amount of messages they have been posting. The number of comments is also pretty high, yet the news editors might need some more time to answer them. As one of the most important parts of the digital revolution is the growing need of people to interact with media professionals.
All in all, this initiative of the Liverpool Daily Post is a good example of the attitude media companies should have. Some optimism in this business doesn’t hurt anybody, in fact, it’s exactly what it needs. Especially now The Guardian Journalist Nick Davies has pointed out with his book Flat Earth News that British newspapers basically just copy/paste from the newswire of the Press Association. A bit of transparency is the least that newspapers can do to win back their audience’s trust.
[WebTipr: David Petherick]
Written on May 13, 2008 – 1:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The guys from Skype have a bad day today, as two mobile industry experts from a Dutch town called Rotterdam launched a mobile application that brings free mobile VoIP calling to 500 hundred different types of mobile phones. Wow! This means that users can make calls around 50 countries and just pay for their local data usage. So you’d better use a flat-rate data plan.
The new Nimbuzz mobile VoIP application works worldwide on Nokia Symbian Series 60 devices when connected using a 3G or Wifi network - with a Windows Mobile offering for release in June. For GPRS/EDGE connections, or when using Java-enabled phones, Nimbuzz also offers its “hybrid-VoIP” solution, which counts for the 50 countries.
Co-editors Boris and Patrick at Nimbuzz’s HQ in Rotterdam
Although the Skype-bashing part is the most interesting, I gladly tell you that Nimbuzz’s app also includes conference calling, instant messaging, chat and group chat, and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including Facebook and Myspace. Founder Evert Jaap Lugt received VC and strategic funding since 2006 by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype investor), Naspers/MIH (Tencent, Mail.ru, Gadu-Gadu, Mweb, Sanook, Tradus) and Holtzbrinck (StudiVZ).
My expectation that for a while, this service will remain a niche thing - they now have 500,000 beta users -, yet after some enthusiastic “you gotta try this” conversations, the masses might pick it up. I know that for a lot of people downloading and installing a mobile app is still little too much to ask, but when Nimbuzz users tell them they can call for free, they’ll probably give it a shot.
The most interesting question here is: what will Skype do? Launch a similar new-and-improved service? Might Nimbuzz become really successful and Skype’s mother company eBay take the advice of their ‘Disruptive Innovator’ Rolf Skyberg - make Skype the third pillar in the eBay empire -, then an acquisition could be in sight. Don’t you also just love to speculate about the next (mobile) web?
Written on May 12, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Tuesday co-editor Boris and Johan Schaap organized a dinner for Marc van der Chijs, a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded China’s largest video site Tudou and the Asia division of online gaming company Spill Group. In Holland and beyond, he’s well-known as a true pioneer who represents the almost endless possibilities in China.
During dinner I had an interesting conversation with him about Tudou, entrepreneurship and enormous bandwidth usage. Van der Chijs came to China because of his job with Daimler-Chrysler brought him there. Yet after a while, Van der Chijs felt the urge to do something on his own and quit his job. “I went from a car with a chauffeur to a bicycle”, he told me. “I signed up for a six-month Chinese language program and started building my first company”. Eventually he co-founded Tudou, and this is where it gets really interesting.
Tudou is one big success story as it’s world’s largest video sharing website. According to Mary Meekers latest data in Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends Report, Tudou (35 billion minutes in January) is 40 percent bigger than YouTube (25 billion minutes). An average visitor, Van der Chijs told me, stays on the site for 47 minutes: “For the young Chinese people, it is a substitute for television”. Competition is tough though, as other major video sites like Youku and 56.com also manage to attract millions of visitors every day.
As you might know, they’ve recently raised 57 million dollars. When I asked Van der Chijs what Tudou will do with this money, he replied: “Spend it on bandwidth”. No other site has a bandwidth bill which is as high as Tudou’s. He said that he could turn Tudou into a profitable business by limiting the bandwidth usage, yet then his competition would probably catch-up. So Tudou uses the recently raised money to invest in servers and its infrastructure. “We’re talking about thousands of machines here”, said Van der Chijs. Moreover, Tudou isn’t doing a bad job with selling advertisements - preloaders and banners - and preventing unnecessary money spending - “I fly economy”.
So take this from a man who knows what he’s talking about: to stay ahead of the competition, video sites like Tudou should invest in bandwidth. And one day, one day it will most definitely pay off.
Written on May 8, 2008 – 3:58 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A brand new music service has just launched an open beta version: Guitarati. Yes, yet another new music service, but wait, this one has a totally different approach then existing music start-ups. Founder Sonal Pandey explained me in an email that the world of music discovery is dominated by tag clouds and rating systems, yet they don’t have anything to do with ‘feelings’ about music. According to Pandey, Chicago-based and self funded Guitarati has found an intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. And it looks like this:
Click on the color that you feel it represents your mood and Guitarati offers you a list of songs. Within this screen, you can either choose a lighter or darker tone. When it gets too new-age for you, just pick a familiar genre.
The business model is more down to earth, as users can listen to a high quality full-length song stream for a cent, and these cents get deducted from the download price - which is determined by the artist - when they download the song. 75% of the earnings go to the musicians and their label.
So the barrier for uploading your own music is pretty low, though I’m not sure people can get used to this new way of picking music. What does a yellow song mean? And what’s the difference with pink? Moreover, I believe every culture has different associations with colors. When western people are in a love mood, they might go for red. But will Asians as well? I wonder how this will develop. One thing is for sure, it’s really interesting to see how the lists of songs for a color will change when more people from all over the world will rate the music.
The biggest challenge for the Guitarati team will be to prove its users they’re not just a gimmick, but a serious way of finding music. Maybe they could get a music star to write a testimonial?
Written on May 8, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
One thing I enjoy most about services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the interesting links people post. Whenever I’m in a desperate need of some inspiration, I head over to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, delicious and some Dutch version. Yet there are more services like this, all offering different ways to present or save interesting finds on the web. Though they’re not that well-known. Let’s change that. Here are sixupcoming tools to share and find interesting links. Start sharing!
Photo by F33
1. Iterasi, save your webpages (private beta)
So you’re now checking out a list of social bookmarking services, yet I can already tell you that not one looks as fancy as Iterasi. It’s a browser-based service that not just saves a link to the preferred page, but includes ALL the information - even links and images. After logging in to Iterasi, you can just scroll through those pages you wanted to save for later. One of the most important advantages is searching through the text. So searchability doesn’t just depend on your tagging skills anymore. For more info I gladly refer to Eric Eldon from Venturebeat , who has published a review.
www.iterasi.com
2. Fleck, annotate the web (beta)
Full disclosure: I’m sitting next to talented developer Lenniez (he’s a good photographer as well) whose actually responsible for this groundbreaking tool. Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s story We are the Web, three entrepreneurs in white suits have started this service that offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. Comes in very handy when you are reviewing a website or if you want to point out a spelling error, to name a few examples. I specifically use it to enrich my links on Twitter (example of the Twitter integration here).
www.fleck.com
3. Socialmedian, social news aggregator (private beta)
New kid on the block by Jobster founder Jason Goldberg that got some blog coverage last month. It’s a social news aggregator which allows you to clip interesting stories. Browse through various News Groups and share relevant links with other news group members. Perfect for folks who want tips from like-minded people. Read the review by Mashable’s charming Kristen Nicole to learn more about this service. Oh and by the way, according to our UK WebTipr David Petherick, it “might be a next big thing”.
www.socialmedian.com
4. i-Lighter, save parts of the Internet
Remember that yellow marker you used in high school and university? Well, I certainly can recall hours of highlighting important stuff in my textbooks. Now there is a digital equivalent to mark text and images you want to save or share. Just download the Windows or Apple desktop app and relive that yellow marker experience for your social bookmarking convenience. The traditional press - such as The New York Times - love this service, probably because the yellow highlighter is such a familiar tool. They’ve probably ignored the useful Twitter integration, as they didn’t use that in highschool.
www.i-lighter.com
5. Bemba
The two kind guys from Bemba aim for people who don’t why complicated services, they just want to get the job done. After these people have installed the Bemba plugin — there’s no bookmarklet — they can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with just two clicks. I interviewed the CEO Aaron Peters a couple of weeks ago and he told me that “Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.” So they’re basically competing with the Share option of Facebook. Read the rest of the interview for more info about this challenge for Bemba.
www.bemba.com
6. Instapaper
Instapaper helps you to get rid of the ‘2read’ tags in del.icio.us by offering a simple bookmarklet and even simpler website. Developer Marco Arment left every fancy function out and focused just on the basics: temporary storage for long articles. Therefore, the site is easy accessible - even with my crappy mobile phone and iPod Touch. After I wrote about Instapaper on April 1, I started using it a lot and browsed to the web page every Saturday for some serious reading.
www.instapaper.com
So that’s it for the new and upcoming sharing and saving tools. Now it’s up to you — which service will you use? Or did I forget your favorite one? Please share it in the comments, so we can create one helluva alternative social bookmarking list.
Written on May 7, 2008 – 12:47 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Genealogy service Geni has some competition: Hellotree. This is a place where you and your family can build a family tree and keep each other up to date by sending private messages. Moreover, there’s also room for nostalgics, as you can post archive photos of those good ol’ summer days in the family garden.
The flash tree is pure eye candy and grows as you and your family members invite more relatives. Though I think it’s not enough, as Geni is HUGE. They have over 15 million profiles and are the definite market leader in this social media area. If Hellotree wants to build an audience like that, they should work on the integration of existing social networks. I mean, they already have the typical Web 2.0 appearance with all the gradients and big fonts. So why not offering all those Flickr addicts to take it beyond the ‘family’ tag?
Family tag on Flickr
If the API’s of services that have a family distinction in contacts support this, Hellotree might have found an angle to become a serious competitor of Geni. With a few clicks, people can already have their Flickr photos and MyBlogLog blogs included in their profile. Work on that, team from Hellotree, and a forest of family trees may lie ahead of you.
[via eHub]
Written on May 7, 2008 – 9:26 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Next Webtipr David Petherick advised me to start using Naked a few weeks ago. That’s a small British start-up in private beta, which aims to give users a better way to communicate with people they really care about than the dozens of other social networks do. It allows you to communicate more freely, in private. Tools are status-updates, private messages and group messages. To me it looks like they’re trying to be a combination between Twitter and e-mail, aimed at a crowd who doesn’t know what Twitter is.
So Naked is into communication and you can tell by the way the team communicates with its users: friendly, open and no-nonsense. They know how to create the feeling of a connection with the service, sort of bonding 2.0. The ultimate example would be the email I found in my inbox a few minutes ago:
The Naked team
Being Naked is all about being open, even if that means sharing not-so-good news. Our start-up has run out of cash. Just weeks before opening up the service more broadly and igniting the buzz…
However, we haven’t given up the faith. We will need to regroup, see who’s still on board, and work out a way forward. In the meantime we’ll do everything possible to keep the service going.
We’ll update you when we have more news.
That’s what I call REAL transparency. And why wouldn’t they be? There are plenty of start-ups that keep their mouth shut while they slowly sink in the deadpool. How is that helping them? By sending out this email they get (1) attention from the press, (2) sympathy from their users, and (3) street credibility - because this really is pr 2.0.
Update: David has ten invites for you to see whether Naked works for you. Drop him a line: david@also.cc
Written on May 7, 2008 – 8:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You might have read about this on Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch UK: Hobnox, a Germany-based start-up that aims to become the next big thing for people in the creative industries. It’s an online music and video platform where users can watch, connect, collaborate and create. Co-founder David Noël sent me an invite so I decided to give it a shot, as his plans sounded very ambitious. What struck me the most when testing the service were the über cool flash-based audio and video Noxtools. I’ve made a screen shot of the audio Noxtool to give you an idea:
Once you’ve figured this tool out it’s possible to upload your masterworks to a personal library. You can then create a playlist that you can publish to the stage for everyone to see. There are also three Channels which are maintained by Hobnox’s own editorial team and streamed in high quality. This team is screening the work of the community to find some hidden talent.
It’s an original concept, yet I’m afraid it’s not original enough to function as a closed platform. To me it sounds like MySpace on steroids. The only part of the service I haven’t seen on the web so far are the super sophisticated Noxtools that bring the music and video editing to the browser. Therefore, the guys from Hobnox should work on integration with other services. I don’t feel like starting another blog, I’d rather import one. Same goes for pictures (Flickr), movies (YouTube), songs (MySpace), and calendar (Upcoming). If you want to show your ‘old work’ on Hobnox you’ll have to upload it all over again, or link to it from your blog.
I’ve e-mailed David to ask whether this will change or not. He replied: “Good point. We plan to add API’s to sync with other services but they haven’t been created yet. We’re still working down the list of features. Users can simply upload their content into a Hobnox profile.”
They’d better hurry, since David also told me Hobnox will launch a rather impressive marketing campaign this summer, aiming it UK, US and main-land Europe. “We will start a contest in the early summer with which contestants can win a 25K€ artist development package. We are also looking for other means of directly approaching creative people. Bar camps, trade fairs, events etcetera, all centered around music, film, and culture.”
Hobnox is one of the coolest start-ups I’ve seen lately - the design, high quality Web Tv and Noxtools certainly make an impression. If they take the walls of their garden down, I’m sure they can attract the creative crowd they’re aiming for.
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