Written on August 14, 2008 – 3:05 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Earlier today we wrote about Twitter’s decision to stop sending text messages to phones outside the US, Canada, and India. Due to an essential difference between business models of US and European mobile operators, the costs became too high.
How Twitter and mobile operators make money in the US
The difference is how these operators handle MT and MO Text messages.
A MO message is sent from a mobile phone (to for instance Twitter).
An MT message is sent from a server to a mobile phone (the Twitter update message).
In the US you pay for sending a text message, but also for receiving a text message. Parties like Twitter who send massive amounts of text messages generate a lot of money for the SMS gateways (or mobile operators). Twitter has a lot of bargaining power and can manage to get 1) the outgoing message for free and 2) a kickback on every delivered message. In other words, the consumer pays for receiving the updates, the carrier earns a bit and Twitter gets a tiny kickback.
A European user costs Twitter up to 7.5 to 10 euros per week
In Europe you only pay for sending the text message. So Twitter is bleeding with every message sent. The costs of sending huge amounts of messages still is around 3 a 4 euro cents per message. So every European Twitter dude can cost up to (250 times 0.03 cent) 7.5 euros to 10 euros per week! That’s obviously not a scalable model.
Option 1: reversed billing
European SMS gateways do offer the possibility to charge the receiver via a so-called reversed billed SMS. The process to charge people via a reversed billed SMS is that you send a message to a short code (e.g. Twitter on to 4200). But the huge disadvantage here is that the total costs of these messages are way higher. A reversed billed SMS costs the receiver normally between 0.25 and 1.50 euros (determined up front by the value added service -in this case Twitter-). Twitter would get a kickback of about 50% of the amount charged, but you can imagine that there are less then zero people willing to pay 25 cents per tweet!
Option 2: a kind mobile operator
Another option is to partner with the operators who would allow Twitter to send the messages for free - hoping that people who receive the message would send one back (to generate revenue). I don’t think that there is one mobile operator who would want to do this, because there is an inter operator charge to deliver a message on a different network of around 1.5 euro cents. And the possible ‘extra’ revenue is far from guaranteed.
Option 3: a pro account
The only viable option I can see is to offer users a PRO account. It makes perfect sense to me: get me some extra cool features and I’ll pay Twitter for it.
Why use SMS anyway?
One more thing. Why use SMS anyhow? It is the most expensive way of transporting data and there are free alternatives. What about twittering per email or via mobile web (For iPhone users there are tons of solutions to work around SMS).
I hope you like that post!
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Written on August 13, 2008 – 5:30 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Behold The Next Web PLAY!
It is summer time, so we thought it would be a nice idea to throw in a little summer event for, startups, VCs, biz dev people, our readers, conference attendees, sponsors…. Well lets say for people who live and breathe the web a.k.a. for you!
What?
The Next Web PLAY is about people, startups and stupid social sports (in this case the highly anticipated French game of Petanque). You play in a team of 2 people (you can bring your co-founder, college, girlfriend or a frenchmen with super petanque skills).
Where?
Museumplein (Museum square) Amsterdam
When?
Saturday August 23rd. We start at 10am - finals are at 4pm.
Costs?
FREE. really? Yes, 0 euros.
Dresscode:
Cote d’Azur style (or just startup style and wear your company tees)
What can I win?
Weekendjeweg is so nice to give the winner a weekend Brussels, this apart from the eternal bragging rights of course!
We have room for 50 teams, so sign up fast.
PLAY is an announcement only event, meaning that each team should announce something (can be company related or personal) in max 140 characters -including the #play tag. I don’t have to tell you what we’ll do with it.
Are you in?
sign up here
more info about who’s joining and sponsor opportunities (as of 150 euros) at http://thenextweb.org/play
Written on August 6, 2008 – 12:25 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
The commercial web is about as 5000 days old. Despite its relatively short existence it changed our life, the way we communicate and how we do business. And there’s a lot more to come.
Every once and a while something special occurs on the web and spreads like fire over the web. Dipity is a service that lets you make a timeline of anything. One of their users (BG K) created a timeline with all internet memes.
Great stuff. Do you remember ‘dancing baby‘ in October 1996? Or Rick Rolled (easy one) in 2007?
Written on July 10, 2008 – 1:23 am Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Apparently the CIA and the BTHV (Bond Tegen Het Vloeken - meaning Association Against Cursing) joined forces to end Cursing on the web.
A representative of the BTHV, and former employee of the CIA told us: “We should all stop █████ing cursing, especially on the █████ing web, since that is so █████ing viral that young and innocent people might copy the unappropriated behaviour. Therefore we came up with a spider to find all █████ing curse word and we insert, what is now known as ‘the black █████ing box’. We are confident that this will lead to the end of cursing on the web and eventually to the end of cursing in general. You can imagine how enthusiastic and proud we are of this mother█████ing great technology”
The first website that was “uncursed” / “black █████ing boxed” was twitter.
Check it out:
Do you think this is a wise decision of these two associations? let us know, and please…. mind your words.
Written on June 23, 2008 – 3:14 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
eBay has acquired Vuvox, a visual media company that lets you create and blend your personal media – video, photos and music into rich personal expressions, for an undisclosed amount of money. What struck me as odd is that eBay hasn’t announced the acquisition at all.
Our source at eBay confirms the acquisition, but apart from the size of the deal (”a small acquisition”), our source cannot give us any more insight. It seems to me that eBay is interested in the technology and maybe the team of Vuvox, but it is hard to guess its purpose within eBay.
On their about the team page, they’re pretty vague about who they are and use nicknames like ‘Da Man’, ‘Fast Talking Business Guy’ and ‘Man of Steel’ but after some googling you’ll find that William Woodward (co-founder of Macromedia, early investor and board member of Myspace) and Dane Howard (author of Future of Memories and designer) are part of the team.
Behind the click is an example of content build with Vuvox technology. (more…)
Written on June 20, 2008 – 7:18 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Yesterday I speculated that Seesmic raised a Series B. The news just got out, Seesmic raised 6 million dollars from Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Nice detail is that Loic Le Meur also took a role in the Wellington Partners team (as a Venture Partner).
Loic is happy with his The Next Web Award and 6 million dollars on the bank.
Written on June 20, 2008 – 1:54 am Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Today we went to the seesmic office to hand out a The Next Web Award in the category Web Celeb to Loic Le Meur. We did the official ceremony in the Seesmic office (check the movie).
Afterwards we had dinner in a sushi bar and Loic told us that they were about to announce big news at Seesmic.
People are guessing what it can be and Robert Scoble was particulary interested.
So what can it possibly be? What is ‘big news’ for a startup? Well that is either an acquisition, a huge partnership or a round of investment.
I believe it is to soon for seesmic to be acquired. A huge partnership could be, but big companies don’t like it that you leak this kind of information before the big press push is going out, so my guess is that they do a series B and raise another couple of millions after their first round in February.
The common consensus is that it is getting harder and harder to raise money nowadays. So to raise some extra money when it is still possible for ‘hard times to come’ sounds feasible.
Written on June 16, 2008 – 11:44 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Germany-based Sevenload, announced at Supernova today that they secured ‘a double digit million euro’ investment from T-Venture which is a part of Deutsche Telekom.
First of all, what is Sevenload, you might think. I’m sure a lot of people have heard of the name, but when asked what the company does, it becomes more difficult. The official statement: “Sevenload is a social media platform for video, photos and interactive show formats”. In my own words, take Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Blip.tv, combine them into one company and you have Sevenload. Sevenload is especially well known in Germany, but with this round of funding, they’ll try to conquer the rest of the world. Starting as a sponsor of Supernova 2008, I guess this will be their first effort to enter the American market.
Sevenload also announced that they joined the “User Generated Content Principles” initiative, to protect copyright claims of content owners. This initiative is backed by big US companies like Disney, Microsoft, Fox, CBS and MySpace.
Oh, by the way, that is Ernst-Jan with a Sevenload shirt, a present for my girlfriend.
Written on August 14, 2008 – 3:05 pm
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