Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 4, 2008 – 9:57 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Want to add social features to your site letting users share information and interact with friends while visiting some of their favorite websites?
Google Friend Connect lets you do that now. This service was in a limited beta since May but now it’s open to all webmasters (open beta). Friend Connect uses open standards like OAuth and OpenID to accomplish this task. The websites which uses Friend Connect can also run OpenSocial applications created by OpenSocial developer community.
It lets websites access username and password of the users along with friends list, feed massages, profile info, reviews and other info.
Google Friend Connect competes with Facebook Connect and Myspace Data Availability in taking control over you online identity. Which one will you choose for your website? (Update: Facebook Connect just announced the general availability too! See a presentation here.)
The learn more about Google Friend Connect watch their presentation video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94s7ix0JPo
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 2, 2008 – 7:05 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Ok, here you go. This is the last web event I am presenting for this year which takes place in Romania on 3rd of December (which means tomorrow).
The event’s name is NetCamp and during this conference there is a section called NetStartup (where the internet startups have a chance to showcase their products or ideas and pitch potential investors - kinda Techcrunch 50, The Next Web Conference or Seedcamp).
NetCamp is at its second edition, hosted at the same Howard Johnson Grand Plaza Hotel from Bucharest which hosted other web events from Romania (Webstock, RoNewMedia). It’s organized by Evensys, a conference and seminar organizer, in partnership with Nokia and Beko as sponsor.
The event has some prestigious guests like Tristan Nitot (president & co-founder, Mozilla Europe), Alexandre Almajeanu (founder, Gentica), Alexis Bonte (co-founder & CEO, eRepublik.ro) si Jan Vichr (board member, Swiss Venture), Bobby Voicu (Yahoo Romania), Vlad Stan (Seed Money), Zoli Herczeg (Microsoft Romania) and others.
At this conference people will discuss about user-generated content, social web, online communities, new business models, blogs & wikis, web analytics, the challenges and opportunities on web. This conference is oriented towards internet professionals, telecom, software, hardware, advertising & media, creators and distributors of online products and services.
On NetStarup section projects or products already on the market will be presented having these themes:
• Content Websites
• Online Applications
• User Generated Content Websites
• Mobile Applications
• eCommerce Sites
• other projects and products (internet & mobile Internet)
This year there are 10 finalists which will showcase their startup to the jury of six members (mostly investors). Each member of the jury can award a 5,000 euro amount to the starup they choose (approx. $6,300). In exchange, the investor gets 10% of the company (sounds like YCombinator investing style).
The investor will be involved also in the next round of financing once the project reached a certain level.
There’s the possibility that all investors could invest in the same project and they will share those 10% of the company (a company can get as much as 30,000 euros - $40,000 without giving up more than 10% of the company…or get 5,000 euros and give up 10%…or get nothing).
And that’s it for this year for Romania.
I’m expecting other people to present web conferences and web festivals from their countries (if there are any).
If you want me to write about them please use my contact page and email found here.
Written on November 21, 2008 – 6:44 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Having big problems at home where the stock is still plummeting Yahoo, finally, sells Kelkoo, the Paris-based shopping comparison search engine, according to Techcrunch.
Kelkoo was bought by Yahoo in 2004 for 475 million euros. Sadly enough, Yahoo couldn’t make it more profitable and known among other international shopping comparison search engines and thus Kelkoo usage has fallen down the hill (see the general trend record on Google Trends - the trends might vary for different Kelkoo domains).
Nothing new here, some of the acquisitions Yahoo made had the same fate…falling down to the competition.
The new acquirer of Kelkoo is Jamplant, a UK-based private equity firm (some details about this company here) and the amount they have paid is around 100 million euros.
Kelkoo will still continue to power Y! Shopping, Cars and Travel.
You can read the announcement from the former Kelkoo CEO Pierre Chappaz here (in French) and here is the internal email Glen Drury, Kelkoo’s managing director for the UK, sent to the employees.
Written on November 20, 2008 – 11:47 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Today, (well, it is yesterday at the time you read this) Google will roll out a new feature to its well-known search engine: custom search results. That is, you can now edit the search results. More power to the masses. The feature’s name is Google SearchWiki and it has been in an experimental phase the last several months (only some users had access to it).
“This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,” said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. That means you have to be signed into your Google account in order to have the possibility to use SearchWiki (the changes you have made will be saved in your account so next time you come to Google you will see your previous work).
You can see the SearchWiki feature to the right of each search result title: an up arrow lets you move a result higher on the page and an X will remove the result. After moving the result higher a down arrow shows up (of course) so you can move it back down the page. After editing the result the icons will turn green and that’s a reminder for you that you edited that result. There’s another icon, a bubble, which lets you leave comments for others to see.
Of course, if you can move and delete results you can also add your input. There’s an “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search results page which lets you do just that. Now, if you removed a result how would you bring it back? No worries, there’s an Undo kinda feature at the bottom of the page.
People can share their SearchWiki notes with others by clicking a “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of each search results page.
Will this feature help Google become even better at sorting out the search results? I wouldn’t be surprised if they would use the data collected to improve their search engine and other services Google has.
By tomorrow (today, at the time you read this) all the users should be able to use this feature and you can tell us your experience with it.
At the time of writing this article I didn’t yet have access to this feature…
Written on November 19, 2008 – 9:18 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Seven years from now The Netherlands will be covered in a web of fiber-to-the-home network thanks to KPN and FTTH operator Reggefiber (according to deVerdieping Trouw).
Of course, the cost isn’t small: about 5-7 billion euros needs to be thrown at the task
KPN and Reggefiber setup a joint venture (KPN wants a 41% stake in Reggefiber) which has to be approved by the authorities.
The places where the fiber cannot reach will be covered by wi-fi network access.
Written on November 15, 2008 – 2:10 am
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
If you are an user of Pandora, the provider of online personalized radio service, you now have the chance to interact and discuss with other users about your favorite music and bands.
Pandora just launched a music discussion forum for its legions of music fans. The new forum provides Pandora’s robust user base with a platform to interact with each other once they’ve discovered new artists and bands. The forum can be accessed here: www.pandoradiscussionarea.com (they could have chosen a better name, I think)
This forum is opened in cooperation with Energizer (remember that pink bunny?), one of the world’s largest manufacturers of primary batteries, battery-powered devices and flashlights. Energizer and its iconic Energizer Bunny® will be presented as a branded skin framing the forum content and will encourage Pandora users to talk about music by creating a user profile complete with avatar choice, share their Pandora music discoveries, ask questions of other users, give opinions on bands and artists and interact with musicians who want instant feedback on new material.
This forum is a good way for Energizer to brand its name more to users (that is, it’s a marketing tool after all).
The forum will be promoted to users via co-branded ads from Pandora and Energizer on Pandora’s home page with a link to the forum and email announcements to registered users with a link to the forum as well.
We will see how much traction this forum will have among music fans around Pandora service.
Written on November 10, 2008 – 7:43 am
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
In the past posts I presented two Romanian web festivals/conferences: Webstock and Internetics
You might wonder “How many Romanian web festivals will you present? And how many of them are there??”
Well, I have two more for you and we are done for this year :).
The newest entrant in this area is RoNewMedia conference. The first edition was held on May 29, 2008 and the next edition is being held as we speak (11 November) at JW Marriot Grand hotel from Romanian capital, Bucharest.
This edition there are even more speakers than the last edition: 34 (many international speakers too)
Last edition drew 450 participants and this number is expected to rise this edition.
In this edition new web projects will be presented and discussed, case studies will be analyzed, real life examples will be shown, networking between participants will be made possible.
There are some high profile international speakers like:
- Alexis Bonte (Investor - erepulik.com and trilulilu.ro)
- Miguel Ripoll (Creative Director - cesserdigital.net)
- Luca Passani (Mobile consultant - WURFL-Pro)
- Marvin Liao (Director of Sales Development for Yahoo! Inc’s Emerging Markets Business Unit)
- Matthew Bowden (Project Manager - Inside Mobile)
- Attila Bihari (Founder - ConQUIZtador.com)
- Lampros Latsaras (Managing Director - CareerBuilder.com.ro)
- Alexander R. Trommen (Marketing director - United-mobile.com)
As well as some local speakers:
- Marius Ghenea (President - pcfun.ro)
- Gabriel Sora (Product manager - Vodafone)
- Dragos Manac (Founder - ghelir.ro)
- Orlando Nicoara (Director - Media Pro Interactiv)
- Anca Fieraru (Director - eResearch Corp.)
- Lucian Despoiu (Founder - Kondiment.com)
- Ionut Oprea (Director - IAB Romania and Blogagency.ro)
- Dragos Novac (Director - Metropotam.ro)
One of the main attaction of this conference is the RoWebDesign Awards section which will select and award the best designed romanian websites which are totally original (it is called “anti copy-paste” award). There are no competition categories. The only criterias for a site to enter in the competition is to be absolutely original in design and to be romanian.
This new festival managed also to attract powerful partners and sponsors like The Money Channel, Vodafone, Business Standard, Cotidianul, HTTPool Marketing.
The fact that there’s so many web conferences and festivals shows the apetite of Romania in digesting this new communication media.
I will not be surprised if other new events will pop up next year.
Written on November 5, 2008 – 5:42 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Bad news doesn’t seem to stop for Yahoo. Several days ago they killed Yahoo! Live, the live video streaming service.
Now today Google decided to pull the plug to Google-Yahoo advertising deal, a deal which would have brought around $800 million/year to Yahoo and would have filled partially the hungry-for-cash pocket of the old search engine and portal.
The main cause which made Google walk away seems to be that the government regulators and some advertisers still had concern about this deal and Google didn’t want to get into a legal battle, according to Google blog.
“However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.“
Google probably didn’t forget the advertising deal with MySpace where they paid hundreds of millions/year in exchange of having Google search on the well-known social networking site. Probably they don’t want to repeat that with Yahoo (especially in this bad economic time), but this is just a assumption.
Anyway, Yahoo now has an even rougher road ahead. It has to find another cash cow or it has to improve its advertising technology to make it more competitive. If that means sacrificing Jerry Yang and the rest of the staff, then so be it.
Surprisingly, Yahoo stock went up 5% after this announcement while Google stock went down 1.4%. That won’t last long probably.
Either way, I hope Yahoo will not fade out totally and leave behind only two major Internet players: Google and Microsoft.
Good luck, Yahoo!
Written on October 30, 2008 – 8:06 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Continuing the series of articles about European Web 2.0 events I will stop again to Romania to present the oldest web festival there: Internetics.
(maybe I should stop using the word “Web 2.0″ once it’s declared dead now)
Internetics web festival was started 8 years ago and it’s held annually (this is the 8th edition). For this year, the festival started on 29 of October and it will end today, 30 of October. The registration of the web projects ended on 14 of September.
Internetics is structured as a competition between the best romanian websites in three main categories: Publishing, Services and Advertising & Communication.
Each of these categories have sections (examples: Publishing has Business, Sport, Lifestyle, News and others… Services has E-commerce, Financial and others… Advertising & Communication has the most sections like Corporate Promotion websites, Viral Promotion, Innovative Projects, Politics, Advergames, Banner Campaigns, Email Campaigns, Interactive Campaigns and others).
The winner of each of these sections will get a prize named “Internetics Icon”. They have two special more prizes for Publishing category (Publisher of the Year) and Advertising & Communication (Agency of the Year).
Another special prize is given to the Webvertiser of the Year and recognize the innovation and visionarism of the clients regarding the Internet as a communication medium. This last prize is given in cooperation with IAB Association from Romania (a subsidiary of IAB - Interactive Advertising Bureau).
The jury is formed by over 40 professionals from various industries which have ties with the Internet (GECAD Software, Rompetrol, Adobe Romania, Kanal D, Clickio, Grapefruit, Yahoo Romania, Totalsoft, ARBOinteractive, PCfun & FIT Distribution, Orange, Neogen, Trilulilu, Publimedia and others including independent professionals).
The festival has some powerful partners like Hostway, Microsoft, Cosmote, IAB Romania, iNES Group, Realitatea, Guerilla Radio, The Marketer, Business Standard and others.
Unfortunately, the website doesn’t have an English section. I know it’s a local event but still, I don’t think letting non-Romanian speakers know about this event would hurt.
In the next two months two more conferences will take place: RoNewMedia (web design) and NetCamp (web entrepreneurship).
Written on October 30, 2008 – 10:42 am
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
TubeMogul, the popular online video syndication and tracking service, announced the acquisition of the video analytics company Illuminex. The amount of the money wasn’t disclosed.
If you are a video publisher and want to automatically upload your creations onto the most popular video sharing sites (like Youtube) and track the results then TubeMogul is the service you will use. It’s one of the first services to offer this and it has some impressive clients: Warner Bros, CBS, Wallstrip, Rocketboom, Comedy Central, Universal, National Geographic, etc. (over 40,000 in total).
Illumenix will extend the TubeMogul’s product offering through its suite of patent-pending tools that track data far beyond the traditional metric of video “views”. At an individual video level, Illumenix is able to track viewer engagement, including how much of a video is actually watched, what the most popular segments of a video are, when a viewer clicks away and much more. At a site-wide level, Illumenix is also able to track minutes-viewed by category and viewer behavior around the content as a whole. And in a world where video is embedded everywhere, Illumenix is also able to report on what sites video views are coming from, including referring sites and search terms.
Illumenix is a growing service tracking hundreds of millions of video streams per month. Clients include “Internet Television” pioneer Revision3 and eBaum’s World, a comedy site that averages about 30 million streams a month.
The combined forces strengthens TubeMogul’s market position in video syndication and analytics services competing with others such as Brightcove, VisibleMeasures (which acquired VidMeter sometime ago).
“We are impressed with the Illumenix team and their early traction,” comments Brett Wilson, CEO and co-founder of TubeMogul. “We have overlapping customers that need both distribution and analytics, and a combined entity will solve both problems,” he says.
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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. (
