Written on March 27, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday we reported that French railway company SNCF will offer a wireless Internet connection on its trains. A few minutes ago I noticed a story on MobileCrunch saying that the UK will allow mobile calls from aircrafts.
The Office of Communications announced that the UK will allow passengers on a British aircraft to make calls and send text messages once the plan reaches a minimum height of 3,000 meters. During take-offs and landings, calling is still a no-go.
A spokesperson from the Office of Communications said: “The safety of passengers is paramount and mobile systems on aircraft will only be installed when they have secured approval by the European Aviation Safety Agency and the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK”. Moreover, they’re in discussions with other countries whether phone calls can be allowed on all European flights.
So being unreachable for a few hours due to some ambiguous ”don’t-use your phone or we will crash’ fear will soon be history. It seems like traveling in Europe becomes more convenient by the day.
[Tipr: Peter Evers]
I hope you like that post!
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Written on March 26, 2008 – 3:15 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When traveling through Europe, trains come in handy. It’s cheaper and sometimes faster than flying. Moreover, the train seats are more comfortable than the cramped up Easyjet chairs. You even got the space to open your laptop without having to sit with your elbows in your neck. So far, there’s only thing missing though: wireless Internet. Of course some people have this Vodafone satellite connection, but that’s just slow. No, we need a fast and reliable connection.
Well, vive la France! The French are making my wireless Internet dream reality. Railway company SNCF announced today that the company is running tests with three trains from and to Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg. It’s just six weeks before the first Internet-equipped train will leave the station.
The infrastructure of the wireless connection has been developed by Orange, Capgemini, Eutelsat and Alstom Transport and is suitable for every Train Grande Vitesse.
I think it’s a great way to lure travelers away from planes into trains. A lot of people will save time and money if they can keep working online during a trip. The only thing that might temper my enthusiasm is the price SNCF will charge for a Wifi key.
Written on March 25, 2008 – 8:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During one of the lunches at the LIFT conference in Geneva I met Markus Fuhrmann. He’s the co-founder of Web2Asia. A European service with headquarters in Shanghai that specializes in supporting western Internet companies and Mobile content developers to get a company or service going in China, Japan and Korea. Needless to say, there’s a lot of potential in these rapidly developing markets. Some of their clients are Jimdo (Germany), Xendex (Austria) and Vanilla Live Games. I kept in touch with Markus, and the business he runs turns out to be really fascinating. So I decided to ask him some questions about this hard to comprehend Asian markets.
Markus has a entrepreneurial history in games. His story in China began with an IMBA semester at Tongji University in Shanghai. “In the beginning I both loved and hated it in China, because I started my stay with one week in a Chinese hospital with pneumonia. After recovering and getting used to the cultural and environmental differences, I started to enjoy the dynamics and sheer endless opportunities available here.” He consulted several companies on how to launch in China. When he met his partner George Godula they connected immediately and it made perfect sense for them to team up.
How to bring a product from Europe or the US to Asia
So, when I want to enter the Asian market, what should I take in account? “The East Asian characters. This is a smaller problem for completely web based services but can amount to a lot of work if you have to change your client or back end infrastructure because you forgot to use Unicode and double byte support in the first place. In terms of function and usability there are a lot of things to watch out for, especially in Japan and Korea with the example of mobile phone support, which is crucial.”
“The second important part is the content side. Here you have to take care that the content fits the Asian culture, especially in terms of symbols and language. Another sensible topic is working specifically to local legislation requirements and restrictions on certain content.” I assume Markus is referring to dealing with censorship in China. Which probably brings some conscience issues.
The last part is less complicated and controversial, namely the feasibility of the underlying business model. Markus: “It’s already quite hard to earn money through advertising in Europe and the US, but it is even more difficult to earn money through this model in East Asia. The positive examples have been able to transfer a model of premium memberships, customizable content - micro payments - and value added services.”
Facebook doomed to die
These three different parts seem to create some obstacles for all the global players, since they failed to gain a foothold in East Asia. “One of the most famous examples that didn’t work out in China has been Ebay China, the local competitor Taobao realized that Chinese users prefer much more to buy products instantly than to wait for an auction to end. Same thing with Google; in Korea the company only has approximately 6% of the market share. As for other western hypes, they have yet to make it to East Asia, which are not good signs either. For example, jokes are already going around in China calling Facebook, “fei si bu ke” (非死不可) a transliteration which means ‘doomed to die’.” (more…)
Written on March 17, 2008 – 12:43 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yes, I’ve again discovered a new search application that tickled my interest. It’s called Surf Canyon and it specifies your search results by offering three relevant links. After downloading a browser extension, Surf Canyon shows a bull’s eye behind a search result. When clicking on it, Surf Canyon gives you three suggestions within the search page itself. So it’s basically helps you to find relevant results in the ever growing amount of rubbish content on the web.
These days, new search apps and services popping up everywhere so you gotta offer something special if you want to get noticed by the crowd. So I decided to test the pitching skills of Surf Canyon’s CEO Mark Cramer. What is his service going to add?
Cramer: “Innovation is very strong at the moment. There are literally thousands of different search-related websites right now. We certainly fit into that trend, however, our technology - real-time personalization - and implementation - client-side browser extension - are, we believe, innovative and powerful.”
So how does Surf Canyon fit into the future of search? Cramer: “We believe strongly in implicit personalization. Clustering, query suggestions, visualization and universal search will certainly be very important, however, as the quantity of content on the Internet explodes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to access all of that information with two- and three-word queries. Users could enter more keywords, either suggested or not, but this can be difficult, tedious and often eliminates potentially relevant documents. Therefore, something is needed to get a better understanding of the user’s intent beyond the query.”
“By disambiguating the user’s intent post-query, we enable access to a much greater quantity of information by automating the process of digging out relevant results”
And Surf Canyon believes to have found that. Instead of looking at the surfing history, Surf Canyon focuses on real-time behavior. “This behavior gives very strong signals as to the user’s ‘at the moment’ intent, which is potentially a much more important indicator of relevancy”, Cramer explains. “These indicators of relevancy are imperative since the ambiguous nature of queries makes it virtually impossible to put all of the relevant results on page one. By disambiguating the user’s intent post-query, we enable access to a much greater quantity of information by automating the process of digging out relevant results.”
Apart from it’s new approach on search personalization, I also like the international mindset of Cramer and his team. Most US-based start-ups just focus on the huge home market, yet Surf Canyon works in 13 different languages. And that immediately pays off, since the search service is pretty big in France, Cramer says. Why is that?
“The major reason we’ve got so much traction in France probably has to do with the excellent coverage we’ve received there. We got nice reviews at Outils Froids and Journalistiques. But most important was the review on Rue89. It helps when somebody compares you to Google in an article entitled “Welcome to the 3rd Age of Search”.
I think other US-based start-ups can learn from Surf Canyon’s approach. As you can tell, offering European languages definitely works when your service is relevant for Europe. So yes, it might be worth the effort and money to hire some French or German students.
Written on March 15, 2008 – 5:37 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Raphaël Arbuz from WatZatSong. Our UK WebTipr David Petherick met him during start-upcamp in London. Together with some fellow-students, Arbuz founded this English-with-a-French-accent named service. Users can hum a song of which they forget the artist or the title. The community can then guess which song it is. So you have the quiz-factor and you’re also helping people out. How did they come up with this funny and useful idea?
How did you come up with the idea of WatZatSong?
“Thibault Vanhulle and I were sharing a flat in London while finishing our studies. We were both absolutely crazy about music quizzes and one day, hearing a song that none of us knew, Thibault said “wouldn’t it be great if there was a website where you could hum a tune and the visitors would listen and tell you what it was?”. I loved this idea and, after having been joined by Erez Abittan, a fellow classmate from my French engineering school, then studying at Notre Dame University in the United States, we started developing it straight away.” (more…)
Written on March 11, 2008 – 12:26 am
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
This is the last call for European startups and entrepreneurs to be nominated for a The Next Web Award. Already a lot of services have signed up, but we know that there are a lot more cool companies and web celebrities out there. Tomorrow we will close the database and prepare the final list of nominees.
Last year The Next Web Awards counted 85.000 votes and was already quite a success. Now we’ve teamed up with TechCrunch France, TechCrunch UK, Loogic and Frankwatching so we’re sure that Europe knows that this is the time to celebrate their internet heroes.
Nominate your favorite service now!
Written on March 9, 2008 – 3:32 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, Managing Partner of YL Ventures - an European and Israeli early stage technology venture capital fund - emailed me that they will announce tomorrow that YL Ventures is appointing Robert Goldberg as a Venture Partner. He is a Silicon Valley Internet and digital media veteran and now shifts his focus to Europe and Israel.
So I’ve emailed mr. Goldberg with the question: why Europe? Isn’t it more attractive for an American VC to focus on the 300 million English-speaking people market of the US? He replied, saying: “After spending considerable time investigating and experiencing the European market first hand and through Yoav, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a very interesting investment opportunity there for several reasons.”
“First and foremost there is a pool of passionate entrepreneurs with substantial technical talent. Second, similar to what happened in the US in the early part of this decade, Venture Funds grew larger and more risk adverse, largely abandoning their ability to invest smaller amounts of money in early stage companies. That trend has reversed itself in the US, but not in Europe. This leaves great entrepreneurs with early stage ideas fewer options. The opportunity is filling the excess demand with supply! Thirdly, although in many ways trends and ecosystems often develop first in the US, that can also lead to a kind of group think. I have found a different, often refreshing and more innovative approach to developing opportunities in the market place coming from European and Israeli companies.”
Of course, the European internet entrepreneurs who are reading this article now, wonder whether Robert Goldberg might be interested in their start-ups. Luckily Goldberg is kind enough to give you a profile: “We are focused on companies in the media, mobile and internet infrastructure space that have a passionate founder with domain expertise. These companies have business models that are capital efficient in that expenses can be kept in sync with market traction and revenues.”
Written on March 5, 2008 – 3:58 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
With the open beta launch of Bemba today, the web has another service for your sharing needs. This one is all about keeping things simple and wants to work on top of social networks. When I was at Le Web 3 in Paris, I met the founders Aaron Peters and Arne Dibbits. They told me that they were aiming to develop a service that is easy to use for the not so experienced Internet users between 18 and 30 years old. How will they achieve this?
Peters: “People like to share websites and videos with their friends, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. And while funsurfing the web is gaining popularity, people find it difficult discover entertaining new content. Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.”
Peters and Dibbits’ first day at the Bemba office
After users have installed the Bemba plugin - there’s no bookmarklet - , users can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with two clicks. Well, that’s the plan. So far it’s only interesting for people who use Hyves - the largest Dutch social network with 5,5 million users - and Twitter. Bemba has developed a fancy gadget for Hyves and sends shared pages to Twitter with an URL shortener. Integration with MySpace, Facebook, Netlog and other major social networks is on its way. And it should be, if they want to leave a good first impression these first months.
As more smart European start-ups do, Bemba will translate its service in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch before the end of May 2008. But why not in Turkish? There’s a huge market in Turkey, since the number of young people exceeds even the most populated countries in Europe. 2.1 million of these youngsters is using Facebook, another 2.5 million uses Netlog.
I’ve tested the service and must admit, it IS simple. I hope for the guys of Bemba that users like their sharing apps, so that it will become viral. Only then they might manage to convince people to not click on ‘Share with Facebook’ but on ‘Share with Bemba’.
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