Written on September 5, 2008 – 2:21 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
September 2, 2007 - Google was rumored to launch a mobile payment service (”GPay”) after it filed a patent that suggested something like that. Nothing has come from it yet, but then again, Android is just now making its way to the mobile industry so there may still be a killer mobile app just waiting to be released into the wild.
September 4, 2007 - Dopplr, an online service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, hadn’t launched publicly yet, but it raised early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. Meanwhile, Dopplr opened to the public and keeps on adding nice features, but we’re not sure if it’s getting massive adoption in the world of frequent travellers or not, since it’s been a while since they’ve shared numbers.
September 4, 2007 - Cuill (with double L back then) was still in super stealth mode but rumors were swirling: Google was said to have already made a buy-out offer, and the company would well be acquired before launching etc. Well, Cuil launched with much fanfare and little acclaim. Supposedly a Google killer, users went on to mock the new service for days on end for not returning the right search results and pictures of other people when doing name searches. The buzz swiftly went away, and the latest report on the company says that its indexing bot kills websites. Ouch.
September 5, 2007 - Microsoft launched Silverlight, its browser-plugin / Flash rival. Silverlight is evidently still trailing Adobe by a long shot, but the Redmond giant has time to sit this one out, and some cool stuff is being built with it. Meanwhile, some go as far as saying it’s actually evil and MS is returning to its wicked ways from the past. The recently launched Google browser Chrome / Javascript could pose somewhat of a threat to its future, according to some. To be continued!
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on September 4, 2008 – 10:53 am Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I genuinely believe there will be a lot of interesting developments in the mobile industry during the next 5 years that will come from a number of innovative startups, but it’s hard not to get equally excited about the power play between the main vendors and mobile OS distributors.
I’m looking forward to the competition between Apple / iPhone / App Store, Google with the massively potential Android (and “Chrome for Mobile”?), Microsoft with its large Windows Mobile market share and its upcoming Skymarket application store, and not to mention Nokia with its huge bet on Symbian.
Nokia announced about two months ago that it intended to fully acquire Symbian for €264 million (or $410 million) and turn the software over to the Symbian Foundation. This is a group of nearly 30 companies including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone that seeks to turn Symbian into a royalty-free mobile software platform focused on converged communications.
The Nokia / Symbian acquisition has now come (almost) full circle with Samsung backing out and selling its stake to the Finnish mobile giant.
And the numbers are looking good for Symbian too: during the second quarter, Symbian launched on 19.6 million devices, up just 5 percent from 18.7 million for the same period the year before. Symbian also reported that it had 92 phone models in development (the highest ever achieved), an increase of 48 percent on the 62 models in development during Q2 2007.
In the post, CEO Josh Silverman mentions that Skype is nearing 350 million users, and boasts about ‘6 quarters of profitability’ and ‘over $500M annual revenue run-rate’.
Skype is certainly doing ok, and it is still one of the first companies bring up when they talk about European entrepreneurship and its successes. EBay acquired Skype in September 2005 for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.
But what will the future bring for the free communication utility?
Ebay seems less happy with the acquisition than a few years ago. In October 2007, it took a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype, and it became apparent then that Skype’s revenue streams failed to live up to expectations. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom even stepped down as CEO.
Its model for actually making money has been called flawed repeatedly. 2008 would become a year of “testing synergies” between the online voice and video communications service and other eBay operations such as auctions and PayPal. eBay CEO John Donahoe told the Financial Times in April of this year that “if the synergies are strong, we’ll keep Skype in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it,” and possibly sell the unit. Rumors of a Google / Skype merger went swirling.
But it hasn’t come to that yet, and at this point it’s pretty hard to predict where Skype will be in say, a year.
Written on August 29, 2008 – 1:10 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not. (Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on this in the comments.)
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
August 26, 2007 - AllOfMp3, the infamous Russian MP3 retail site was rumored to make a comeback after being shut down by the Russian government after inmense international pressure. That didn’t happen, at least not under that name. The RIAA dropped its lawsuit against the website, but didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the site simply relaunched under a different name, MP3Sparks. That clone remained online for a little while, but now has been closed as well. Its predecessor seems to be GoldenMP3.
August 27, 2007 - Free Voip enabler Jaxtr raised $10 million in a Series A round, and reached 1 million users. The company is still going strong with over 10 million users, and raised the same amount in a Series B round announced just last month. Jaxtr is now operational in most of the world.
August 28, 2007 - Rumors about a ‘Gphone’ or ‘Google Phone’ were swirling, and some even ushered talk about a Google-powered OS. Back then, it was referred to as ‘Gphone OS’, even if Google had already acquired Android in 2005 (without making a big fuzz about it). Meanwhile, the first Android-powered mobile phone, the HTC Dream or T-Mobile G1 is well on its way, and just yesterday Google announcedAndroid Market, an upcoming app store for developers, similar to the iTunes App Store (but not entirely the same).
Written on August 28, 2008 – 4:56 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Viewdle, the face-detection oriented video search technology company, has touched base with us to announce the alpha release of VideoFriends, a Facebook app which helps you organize your videos with extensive tagging and sharing utilities.
So far, the only platform that’s supported is YouTube, although the company promises that they “will add support for many more mobile broadcast and upload applications soon”.
Since Viewdle is all about facial recognition, I assume that the app is just a tool for them to enlarge their index and improve their automated detection skills.
Viewdle recently raised an undisclosed round of funding from KIT Capital, a Dubai-based digital media investment group. One of the media partners currently testing their technology platform is Reuters.
Written on August 27, 2008 – 11:24 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Here’s a new startup likely to implode sooner or later: MiaMia, a service that aims to leverage computational linguistics, natural language processing, speech synthesis & recognition, automatic machine translation, semantic processing, and a wide range of other buzz words in order to provide users with a way to have simple questions answered by SMS or e-mail.
Hong-Kong-based MiaMia (short for “Mobile Intelligent Assistants”) is dubbed the ‘ultimate interface for mobile and internet users’ who want to receive relevant, compact answers to questions posed in their natural language, both spoken or per text message. In November, a new service will be added to the core offer called the MiaMia Email Secretary, which will enable users to dictate emails and email addresses, as well as retrieve emails and listen to emails read to the users.
Most of the answers to the questions that come in will be provided automatically by a host of servers, but fortunately human ‘knowledge assistants’ will be standing by to make sure you get the right response in seconds or minutes.
If this all rings a bell, you’re probably thinking of ChaCha, the dumb mobile answers service which Michael Arrington so loves to hate.
And here’s why it will most probably fail: it’s simply unscalable. Just reading this text on the MiaMia product pages makes me cringe:
That is why MiaMia® has decided to have all incoming spoken questions transcribed, in a few languages (including Chinese), by human transcribers, present in the MiaMia® call centers. Later, maybe in a few years from now, ASR will do the transcription job (based on the former logs in MiaMia® centers of all spoken-transcribed questions) mostly automatic. But for now, humans are still needed to accomplish that part of the job.
Here’s another interesting tidbit: one of the company’s founders is notorious in Belgium and in business circles worldwide. Jo Lernout is his name, and he was one of the founders of the infamous Lernout & Hauspie, a speech-recognition company established in the late eighties, which went public on NASDAQ in 1995, grew to a market cap of $10 billion and was ultimately the subject of a major fraud investigation started by a critical Wall Street Journal article, followed by a high-profile bankruptcy in 2001, an event that my home country is still licking its wounds about. The corporate scandal is often compared to the Enron affair.
Somehow, I think his latest venture holds no great future either.
Written on August 27, 2008 – 12:22 am Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
The European Founders Fund, the investment vehicle of the infamous Samwer brothers, puts money in social networking sites other than Facebook. According to a regulatory filing picked up by peHUB, the EFF has invested $1 million in Series A-1 funding for Dizzywood, a San Francisco-based creator of entertainment websites for kids.
“Dizzywood is a fun virtual world for kids where you can play free games, explore unique and imaginative areas, and meet new friends in a safe environment. Whether it’s a visit to a Mayan-themed jungle or a super power challenge to defeat Emperor Withering, Dizzywood offers children ages 8-12 the opportunity to create their own adventure, cooperate with other players in exciting games and challenges, and have fun while learning.”
Virtual worlds for kids is certainly a hot space: both RocketOn and Knowledge Adventure recently raised $5 million second rounds, Gaia Online took $11 million in a third round and Disney recently acquired Club Penguin for $350 million (with $350 million in earn out).
Dizzywood won the Best in Show Award at the 2008 Under the Radar Conference. Last February, TechCrunch reported that the company had raised $1 million Series A in a round led by Shelby Bonnie with Charles River Ventures with other individual investors also participating.
Dizzywood has notable founders, including Scott Arpajian, who headed CNet’s Download.com for over a decade in the past, ex-Microsoftie and former Wallop CTO Sean Uberoi Kelly and Ken Marden.
Written on September 5, 2008 – 2:21 pm
September 2, 2007 - Google was rumored to launch a mobile payment service (”GPay”) after it filed a patent that suggested something like that. Nothing has come from it yet, but then again, Android is just now making its way to the mobile industry so there may still be a killer mobile app just waiting to be released into the wild.
September 4, 2007 - Dopplr, an online service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, hadn’t launched publicly yet, but it raised early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. Meanwhile, Dopplr opened to the public and keeps on adding nice features, but we’re not sure if it’s getting massive adoption in the world of frequent travellers or not, since it’s been a while since they’ve shared numbers.
September 4, 2007 - Cuill (with double L back then) was still in super stealth mode but rumors were swirling: Google was said to have already made a buy-out offer, and the company would well be acquired before launching etc. Well, Cuil launched with much fanfare and little acclaim. Supposedly a Google killer, users went on to mock the new service for days on end for not returning the right search results and pictures of other people when doing name searches. The buzz swiftly went away, and the latest report on the company says that its indexing bot kills websites. Ouch.
September 5, 2007 - Microsoft launched Silverlight, its browser-plugin / Flash rival. Silverlight is evidently still trailing Adobe by a long shot, but the Redmond giant has time to sit this one out, and some cool stuff is being built with it. Meanwhile, some go as far as saying it’s actually evil and MS is returning to its wicked ways from the past. The recently launched Google browser Chrome / Javascript could pose somewhat of a threat to its future, according to some. To be continued!
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
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. (
