Archive for the ‘Italy’ Category
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. Expedia bought 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.
I hope you like that post!
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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 6, 2008 – 12:55 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Flash-publishing tool Sprout has a new competitor, and a it’s pretty tough one. Israeli-based Wix doesn’t just makes widgets, but also complete sites. People who are web-savvy enough to maintain a Flickr and YouTube account, but find it too complicated to build a fancy flash site, should definitely read this post.
Co-Founders Giora Kaplan, Avishai Abrahami, and Nadav Abrahami launched their service in open beta at the end of last June, saying that it’s “a big step forward in our journey to change the way web content is created”. I’m not sure whether this is a little bit too enthusiastic, yet I do think Wix can help starting web publishers to shape their online identity.
Thanks to a drag ‘n drop interface, users can create three sorts of Wix publications: the WixSite (1), a Flash-based website that uses an XML file to make it Google-friendly. ExtraSpace (2), a flash widget that allows you to spice up your MySpace page. The third option is WixComment, a fancy widget that functions like an embeddable bio on social network pages. There are several templates available, categorized under Business, Art, Personal, Music, Designers, and MySpace.
To give you an example of how Wix can be used: my grandparents have just celebrated 50 years of marriage and also bought a computer. I can browse to Wix, open the Personal category, select the family tree option and start building a really good-looking genealogy tool for them. Best of all, it will cost me absolutely nothing - except some time.
Written on June 13, 2008 – 5:24 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Would you like to know where to see your favorite artist this summer? Head over to The Last(.fm) Music Map, a - good guess - Last.fm/ Google Maps mash-up by Italian webdeveloper Michele Marcucci. The Music Map imports concert data from Last.fm and shows it on a Google map of the world. The site also showcases similar artists to the one you were searching for. And guess what, I’ve already bought a ticket via this übercool mash-up
My hero used to be Lenny Kravitz. Till my sixteenth I used to buy every album the man released. One minor detail though, I’d never seen him on stage. Well, this is gonna change as I’ve found out via Music Map that the 44-year old rocker will perform in Holland on June 28th.
Though I’m happy with my concert ticket for mr. Kravitz, I’m pretty sure this will be my last visit to Music Map. There’s nothing that stimulates me to come back. So an useful contribution the site would be a ‘keep me up to date’ option. Like a RSS feed or weekly newsletter. Otherwise I’ll just browse to the events section of Last.fm.
By the way, checking out where your music hero is playing is not the only interesting aspect of the Music Map, as you can also tell how hectic it must be to be a rock star. A map like this makes you realize that these guys are flying some miles. I guess I’ll stick to blogging…
Written on June 9, 2008 – 6:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Just before the start of a manic football night, I found an interesting blog post by a blogger from the evil side, Italy. Web professional Marco Corsaro wondered whether an “innovative player” was taking advantage of social media to market his services by using the euphoric state Europe is in. People are so sucked up into the game, that they will just participate in anything - as long as it has to do with football. A stupid example: I just dropped by the supermarket where you get a small lion - the Dutch mascot - for every 15 euros you spend.
When Corsaro browsed Facebook to find such an application, he found over 100 applications and probably chose the most logical way to go - number one on the list. It’s developed by the sports TV network Eurosport and Yahoo. This application allows its contestants to compete by predicting the right tournament results. The best will get.. a 42-inch Plasma TV. Corsaro joined the club and says the following:
So whoever thought about this initiative to drive traffic to the Yahoo!-Eurosport joint portal, is also using it as a “teaser” so users install the applications. And looking at the results achieved so far, I’d say, its not bad at all. My rank (I am the last one since I just joined in) is 38.648 out of 60.651 members…that makes me think that about half the people that have installed the application are also actively playing.
Good post mr. Corsaro, I hope your national team won’t play as nice.
Written on April 19, 2008 – 11:33 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As we reported last week, France is on the verge of adopting a law against “incitement to anorexia” that is mainly focused on the web. It wouldn’t be the last Internet-related law this week, since the European Union announced some tight laws against “incitement to terrorism” on the Internet. By doing this, the EU wants to fight militant groups who amongst other things recruit and mobilize young people.
A statement by the ministers said that the existing Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 will be expanded by introducing three new offenses: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offense, recruitment and training for terrorism.”
Reuters reports that countries like Spain and Italy already punish public provocation to terrorism, but others, like Scandinavian countries will have to change their laws. Spain’s secretary of state for justice, Julio Perez Hernandez, told the press agency that “The battle to anticipate terrorist acts is crucial for Spain. One should not wait for smoke to know there is terrorism.”
Although the statement says that it’s “well-balanced in terms of its effects on freedom of speech and general respect for human rights”, civil action groups will probably ring the alarm bells. Though I’m not sure whether the public will actually care. Europeans have seen so many anti-terrorism laws that limit their freedom already, that they might have become numb for amendments like these.
Written on March 28, 2008 – 2:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Craigslist, the website that brought classified ads from newspapers to the web in 1995, has joined the translation train. Like other American Internet giants, they saw the need to support more languages than just English (and Spanish).
Founder Craig Newmark originally created the service for the San Fransisco Bay Area. In 2000, he started conquering more and more cities in the U.S. As of September 2007, Mr. Newmark’s company has established itself in 450 cities in 50 countries. The site counts 27 million unique visitors monthly.
Yet as TechCrunch reported last month: competitor Kijiji - owned by Ebay - is picking up speed and even claims to surpass Craigslist one day. The eBay executive in charge of Kijiji explained to TechCrunch why they started Kijiji in the first place:
We did not believe Craigslist was going to be successful internationally with an English-only site. Craigslist has had zero localization. It is all English, run out of San Francisco.
This tough talk must have made an impression on Craigslist’s staff because normally they ‘tend to do stuff without much announcement‘, but now they ‘figured you might want to know that we implemented multiple language support for craigslist in November. Just Spanish then, but last week we added more languages’.
These languages are Italian, French, Portuguese and German (click for examples). It seems like more and more major companies think of multilingual support as the key for further growth. Although Craigslist might be pushing it too far: “Basque, maybe Klingon, are next”.
Written on December 17, 2007 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last week, General Manager of VC LGiLab Ouriel Ohayon announced an investment in Bahu, a European social network for young students across Europe. Bahu (French slang for High School) is focusing on promoting talents and mainly popular in the south and east of Europe. Only four months after they launched they’d already welcomed a stunning amount of 2 million unique visitors from 6 different countries. Bahu is another chapter in a book about successful European social networks. And trust me, it’s a big book.
Consider Hyves for example. Launched by a group of friends in October 2004, aiming at the Netherlands, a country with only 16 million citizens. Earlier this month they threw a party because they counted five million users. Four million of them are Dutch.
You want another example? No problem! Let’s go south of the Netherlands: Belgium. This even smaller country is home to Netlog, an extremely successful social network that is offering 8 different languages for its 29.8 million users and counts 4 billion page views every month. When Netlog wanted to expand in Turkey, they hired two students to translate the site for 1000 dollar. It took them a week and four months later the Turkish version has 2.5 million users.
The big question is: how do all those European networks, despite the Facebook and MySpace hegemony, manage to attract so many users? There seems to be no space for competitors in the US, but there most definitely is in Europe.
The answer to that question is actually quite simple. Whereas Americans just use one global network, Europeans also use a local version. If I look at my own social network usage, I use Hyves for my Dutch friends and Facebook for the contacts I’ve met during
international seminars and conferences. A lot of my friends and colleagues do the same thing. It’s exactly that kind of usage that adds pages to the Big Book of Successful European Social Networks.
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