Written on July 19, 2008 – 7:35 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Facebook has started to take action against their copycats, and filled a copyright lawsuit against German copycat StudiVZ, in what they claim is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”. This claim is filled a month after Facebook won the accusation filled by ConnectU, claiming that Mark Zuckerberg was a copy cat and stole the social platform idea in 2004.
Facebook in Germany
Facebook has launched a German version of their social network a few months ago, but has problems to attract visitors. StudiVZ claims to have 10 million users, and call themselves “the most successful social network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland”. Their website is not only similar in usage, it also looks a lot like Facebook. The biggest differences are the color conventions and that the copy does not offer an English interface. Techcrunch reports that StudiVZ was acquired this year for about $100 million. (€ 63 million)
Other copycats are next?
Washington Post reports that there are nine other facebook clones out there, and expects Chinese owned Xiaonei, with an exact duplicate to be next. Facebook has to protect their brand and experience, but a but a laugh every once and a while is important too, let’s hope that parodies as Crackbook, Arsebook and Rightwingfacebook are taken with some sense of humor by the Facebook’s lawyers. As entrepreneurs, the people behind estudiLN have cashed their successful copycat approach.
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Written on July 18, 2008 – 11:18 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Samir Arora (left) together with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman
Glam media is expanding to Europe and has announced another acquirement in their pursuit. We reported that the female-orientated vertical-advertising company had used their last funding round of a whopping $85 million (54 million euro) to acquire London based Monetize five weeks ago. It seems that Glam is pursuing a German representation as well, as they are working together with Hubert Burda Media and the acquired Codex Media to accelerate their launch in Germany.
Codex had four employees and the founder will operate as the director of sales for Glam Media in Germany, terms are not revealed. “Germany is one of the most advanced advertising markets in the world, we are thrilled to launch Glam Media Germany today at Berlin Fashion Week together with our strategic partner Hubert Burda Media. Glam is committed to leveraging premium content from our network publishers to help German brand advertisers reach the focused women audience.” tells Samir Arora, chairman and CEO, Glam Media. Hubert Burda Media has a leading position in Germany for the People & Style market with a market share of 35%, but is not specifically aimed at the female market, could the 1.3 billion “Glam Scam”, suggesting that Glam isn’t really focused on women sites anymore be true?
Written on July 16, 2008 – 10:11 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A major acquisition and a round of funding sparked up the European travel industry yesterday. Expediabought Italy-based Venere, German booking site Swoodoo received two million euros from Deutsche Telekom. How’s that for the peak season?
Expedia improves its European position
Chances are high that you’ve once booked a flight or hotel at US-based travel site Expedia, since it offers localized sites for most European countries and has many subsites like TripAdvisor and Hotels.com. The acquisition of Venere strengthens their position in Europe, as Venere lists about 29,000 hotels - mostly from this continent. 10,000 of these hotels were unavailable on Expedia, most of these new hotels for Expedia are based in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Financial details are undisclosed.
Deutsche Telekom works on web presence
The two-year old travel site Swoodoo was welcomed in the T-Online Ventures portfolio - the online division of Deutsche Telekom. Not with an acquisition, but with 2 million euros and upcoming cooperation with several of T-Online Ventures’s sub sites. Swoodoo will use the money for development, marketing, and growing beyond the borders Germany.
Is it the season?
So why do these strategic moves take place now? My simple guess: both sites have been performing really well in the hectic period before the summer. They’ve proved to be financial healthy and have enough traffic coming in. Reasons enough for Deutsche-Telekom and Expedia to make their moves.
Written on July 14, 2008 – 4:27 pm David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
Image via WikipediaSocietas Privata Europaea (SPE) is a proposed EU-wide company type designed specifically for small to medium sized companies to operate in EU member countries, which could be enacted as soon as 2009. This is a core part of the Small Business Act for Europe, which the European Commission unveiled at the end of June, based on ten guiding principles and proposing policy actions for both the Commission and Member States.
Here are some of the headlines in what is being planned:
An SPE formation should be effected within 7 days.
A cap on obtaining business licences and permits of one month.
Lower VAT for services supplied locally.
SMEs can set up their company in the same form, no matter if they do business in their own Member State or in another.
Cut the administrative burden by 25% by 2012.
The press release begins with the wonderful phrase “a step towards a Europe of entrepreneurs, with less red tape and more red carpet for Europe’s 23 million SMEs“. [English Version] [Dutch Version] A set of Frequently Asked Questions also helps to explain the benefits of this initiative.
The lawyers, accountants, international tax experts, company formation outfits and administrative bureaucrats will hate this, as they have long grown fat from the cumbersome and often antiquated legislation and regulations that small businesses are forced to deal with, often irrespective of their size, and the necessity to follow separate, complex, and expensive company formation rules and registrations in each country. I would not be too surprised to see attempts from these types of organisations to slow down and undermine this initiative, as it of course lessens their role, and reduces the number of intermediaries involved when a company expands and works in more than one country.
However, the European entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow will love this - and it is in the long-term interests of every member nation in Europe to support this type of initiative. This is how one creates the jobs of tomorrow. It is a sad fact that long-term enlightened thinking has not always been a strong point for politicians and entrenched vested interests in Europe, so it is up to enterepreneurs across Europe to applaud, support and spread the word about this initiative.
Written on July 14, 2008 – 3:46 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Sometimes I dream of going to my favorite club, grab my mobile, and check who of my friends are there as well - so I won’t miss them in the dancing crowd. If I lived in Germany, this dream would be somewhere close to reality. German folks can look up their friends on aki-aki, a social network that uses bluetooth to see whose around within a distance of 20 meters. Of course I could join the English version, but there aren’t many Dutch people on the site yet. I think I’ll have to wait for such a feature on Hyves.
Anyway, enough about me. Let’s go back to aki-aki. After installing a mobile app and switching your bluetooth on, aki-aki tracks wherever you’ve been and who you’ve met. You can look up this info at the web site to see what you’ve been up to recently. Imagine you’ve ran into someone sixty times, it might be an interesting idea to meet up.
A month ago we reported they were about to receive more capital. Well, that worked out fine, as Aki-Aki has announced (translated) that they’ve received a small investment from venture capitalist Creathor Venture. The size is undisclosed. Partly due to this investment and a talented team, a diploma project at the Berlin University of Arts has grown to a real business with 16 employees.
Written on July 2, 2008 – 2:19 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The prestigious German Bayreuth opera festival might be based on the works of a man who died in 1883, but the organizers sure adopt their annual celebration of Richard Wagner to new technologies. The opening performance of “Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg” will be live broadcast with streaming video and audio. A logical move, as Wagner lovers have to wait seven years or more to obtain a ticket. According to Associated Press writer Patrick McGroarty, there’s one “catch” though - the price of 77 dollars.
Panorama of Bayreuth
The New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala have already offered high definition theatercasts in recent years, but for a lower price. Usually, access to the stream was priced around $24. So it’s not surprising that the AP writer thinks the price for the five-hour opera is somewhat high.
I do think that I have a solution though. I’d like to invite opera lovers to follow the new technologies as well. Why wouldn’t they connect via Opera Meetups or blogs like Mostly Opera, to organize viewings where people can gather to watch the masterpiece? This will save them money, and their ‘bravo’s’ and ‘brava’s” won’t go unnoticed.
Written on June 29, 2008 – 12:25 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In March I coveredAndUnite, a service that matches your search keywords with those from other people - to help you find folks with similar interests. Although this idea may sound kind of awkward, I felt - and still feel - that Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande and Christian Schmidkonz had developed a useful search plugin. You don’t need to tag, bookmark, or anything in that direction, AndUnite just works in the background, slowly but steadily connecting you to interesting people. Very 3.0. Moreover, it’s possible to sign up anonymously - so they’re hardly any privacy issues involved. But now, these two German gentlemen have taken it a step too far for me.
They’ve developed a Facebook application that allows you to share your searches. This was, apparently, a “major request by many users’. But why? Why would you want to share these - mostly boring or private - keywords on your Facebook profile. That’s what I want to figure out with you. Please tell me why you would, or wouldn’t, want to install this app.
Written on June 28, 2008 – 11:32 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While typing this article, I’m listening to an intimate concert José Gonzalez gave in Berlin. It’s published on Sly-Fi, the music channel of Berlin-based Hobnox, that is temporarily functioning as the new MTV for me. Especially as they’ve interviewed the musician as well. Exactly the kind of experience marketing manager David Noel was hoping for: “MTV stopped producing music focused shows that also feature upcoming bands, we think that there is a gap to close.” So the team from Hobnox wants to satisfy all the music hipsters who are fed up with the musical atrocities of Rihanna and Enrique Iglesias.
Noel: “Right now, we produce editorial content for three channels in the broad areas music, film and culture”. The next step though, is more interesting. Hobnox will integrate content from talented users into existing shows or create new shows around them. “The existing formats are always made in a way that our users can easily make these shows themselves. Like the iNterview format. Just grab a laptop with a webcam and answer the questions your fans or friends send you.” (Here’s the latest episode with The Ting Tings)
The player does have some problems (in Firefox) though, as I can’t manage to get the embed code or a direct link. But if Noel and his team fix this, I think I can call Hobnox once again one the coolest start-ups of this year. These new plans make it even better. Seesmic has already proved that using your users’ content for shows can turn out to be really good move, as the funny g-spot episode showed. If Hobnox does the same, but with media talent, this German site could soon become one of my favorite channels.
Written on July 19, 2008 – 7:35 pm
Facebook has started to take action against their copycats, and filled a copyright lawsuit against German copycat StudiVZ, in what they claim is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”. This claim is filled a month after Facebook won the accusation filled by ConnectU, claiming that Mark Zuckerberg was a copy cat and stole the social platform idea in 2004.
Written on July 16, 2008 – 10:11 am
Written on July 14, 2008 – 4:27 pm
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