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Invites for Strands.com, makes Friendfeed looks dumb

Written on October 9, 2008 – 12:43 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

One of the nice things of sending out a weekly newsletter, are the replies of our readers. Man, a lot of them are doing interesting things. Like Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Strands.com VP of communications. His company has been around during four years focusing on developing recommendation technologies to help people discover new things. Over the years they’ve raised $55 million in funding. Now they’ve used their technologies and money to develop a lifestreaming service, one that, Ars Technica says, has “big advantage” compared to Friendfeed. Interesting, uh?

Strands.com has all the regular lifestream things going on: sign up, fill in the RSS feeds forms, and see the content popping up along the way. But the main advantage I was refer to earlier, is that you can filter somebody’s or your own content on its type. So if you have this great friend X, who makes the best songs, but sucks at writing. You can only check his songs (and trying not to hear the lyrics). Why didn’t Friendfeed come up with that? It’s just too logical.

There’s also a tab within Strands.com showing some recommendations and hot content from across the network. That’s were Strands is using its recommendation muscles and where we, users, can discover new stuff.

At least, that is when you’re one of the first hundred to grab an invite with our promotion code thenextweb. Go to Strands.com, click “request an invitation to join Strands” and use the promo code. You will then get an email with the invitation code.

I hope you like that post!

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ars technica, friendfeed, Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, rss, Strands.com

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Message to start-ups: Europe is broadband paradise

Written on May 22, 2008 – 10:46 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As an European entrepreneur you might be delighted to find that you’re actually living on a continent with a rather impressive broadband penetration. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that of the fifteen countries with the highest number of broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, twelve are European.

Denmark is the leading country with 35.1 subscriptions, the Netherlands come in second with 34.8 and Iceland is third with 32.2. Remarkable but true, the United States is only number fifteen of the list with 23.3 subscriptions. The number of broadband connections has been growing 187 percent since 2004 in OECD countries to an average of 20 subscriptions. You can look up all the results in this spreadsheet.

Nate Anderson from Ars Technica draws an interesting conclusion from OECD’s broadband data. He’s clearly worried about the lack of a broadband plan in the U.S.. He then identifies that “Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland all have lower population densities and yet are managing to beat us in broadband penetration. Come to think of it, all five of them are also quite cold and dark for long periods of time.” So a good way to improve the broadband density in the U.S., says Anderson, “maybe is as simple as cooling the country and blotting out the sun.”

So while they’re thinking of drastic measures in the U.S., we can rely on the thought that most of our internet users have a fast connection. Always a good thing to know when building a web-based start-up.

ars technica, broadband, broadband connections, Europe, oecd, study

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