Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Any other ideas for using email as an interface?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 6, 2008 – 4:29 pm
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.
According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:
1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”
2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below). It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.
I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.
In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed. I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.
Written on April 1, 2008 – 2:10 am
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Paramount Pictures said it will be expanding its interactive department to publish online video games, focusing in particular on casual, handheld and mobile games, according to Variety. It makes sense because the mothership Viacom is a true believer of online games in general.
Big companies are tuning into the online games industry and that should lead to one thing in the end; game companies have to bulk up to compete with the others. And if that is not enough, these game companies have to be innovative when it comes to new technology. The more you offer for less, the more broader the games will become for the mass audience.
Dollars are floating
Of course we have already seen this start in 2007, but it already shows that 2008 is an interesting year. Electronic Arts is still in the race to get TakeTwo Interactive (publisher of GrandTheft Auto), ActiVision announced a merger with Vivendi-Universal (Vivendi owns World of Warcraft) and Chinese online games operator 9You has received equity investment. I didn’t put any figures here, but here we go, 9you received $100 million, EA made a bid of $2,1 billion and the merger of Activision/Vivendi is around $18,9 billion.
Nice. In the first quarter of 2008 we are already talking about 20 billion dollars that are floating around in the games industry! Companies like Paramount will easily spend tens of millions of dollars and Viacom already announced spending 500 million dollars on games. 2008 is the year of online games! (more…)
Written on March 27, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. 
Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.
Asi writes:
As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”
Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.
I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.
There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users. About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users. (more…)
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 24, 2008 – 12:15 pm
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
The last few days I had some time and look around over the Internet. As you know, there is a lot of news about companies like Facebook.com and Google. Their success is the motor of a whole industry, they are the fuel for lots of new business ventures. In loads of business-plans you will see entrepreneurs compare their ideas against that of these companies. It is very difficult to create and come up with something unique, I grant you that, but what is it that these companies mentioned above have in common? The answer is; simplicity! Already I hear loads of people wonder if I lost it, but let me assure you, I didn’t.
During the last years I have come in contact with many VC-companies and they all are looking for companies that look like Bebo.com, Facebook, Google and MySpace. The “why” is simple too, these companies re-present high valuations today and therefore the investors who backed these companies made a great “return of investment”. These VC companies contact me if I know entrepreneurs with similar good ideas. In most cases I do send them info about young companies that look for funding. And then it starts; benchmarking! The business plans are going to be compared to the successful companies of today. After a while I have come to believe that VC-companies want something they can understand and compare, they want it too; simplicity! (more…)
Written on March 18, 2008 – 10:43 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Nick O’Neill from The Unofficial Facebook Blog has recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (in a slightly different manner than Sarah Lacy). Here’s what Mark had to say:
1) He believes the reaction to his interview with Sarah Lacy was overblown.
2) Mark claims that the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is more of a technical limitation than anything else and even though users have been complaining about this, it is not something they plan on changing any time soon. However Nick adds:
“I received a different response from one Facebook employee later that night who claimed that it would only be a few lines of code to change. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it definitely is not a high priority at Facebook currently.”
3) Mark claims that Facebook does not want to compete with other application developers. However, this still didn’t stop them from sending out a message to thousands (if not millions) of college students recently telling them to install the March Madness application. Over the last few years, CBS and Facebook had worked together in creating and promoting this application. The fact that Facebook is not allowing other developers the same promotional capability for their applications is angering many developers and justly so. When asked about this controversial issue, Mark mentioned that this year they had actually messaged less users than in previous years.
(more…)
Written on March 17, 2008 – 11:06 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
In only 16 days The Next Web Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From now on we will post short daily updates about speakers and events here.
Chris Saad ‘contemplating the future’
Chris Saad is the Co-Founder and Chairperson at DataPortability.org and CEO of Faraday Media and will be one of our keynote speakers during The Next Web Conference. Ernst-Jan wrote about Chris and his DataPortability project here before in a post titled “How to explain DataPortability.org to average users“.
This is how Chris explained DataPortability: “A user would simply log onto a site, grant permission, and their friends, personal details and media - images, video, documents - are already populated and accessible - Nothing more complex than that.”
The day after the interview was the day of Dataportability’s big breakthrough. Since then Google and Facebook have joined the DataPortability movement. Chris will be talking about his vision for the future of the web and how DataPortability will play a role in freeing our data. Chris lives in the South Brisbane Area, Australia and we are honored and thrilled that he will take the time to travel all the way to Amsterdam to talk to our guests.
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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. (
