Friday Flashbacks: where do GPay, Dopplr, Cuil and Silverlight stand now?
Written on September 5, 2008 – 2:21 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
September 2, 2007 - Google was rumored to launch a mobile payment service (”GPay”) after it filed a patent that suggested something like that. Nothing has come from it yet, but then again, Android is just now making its way to the mobile industry so there may still be a killer mobile app just waiting to be released into the wild.
September 4, 2007 - Dopplr, an online service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, hadn’t launched publicly yet, but it raised early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. Meanwhile, Dopplr opened to the public and keeps on adding nice features, but we’re not sure if it’s getting massive adoption in the world of frequent travellers or not, since it’s been a while since they’ve shared numbers.
September 4, 2007 - Cuill (with double L back then) was still in super stealth mode but rumors were swirling: Google was said to have already made a buy-out offer, and the company would well be acquired before launching etc. Well, Cuil launched with much fanfare and little acclaim. Supposedly a Google killer, users went on to mock the new service for days on end for not returning the right search results and pictures of other people when doing name searches. The buzz swiftly went away, and the latest report on the company says that its indexing bot kills websites. Ouch.
September 5, 2007 - Microsoft launched Silverlight, its browser-plugin / Flash rival. Silverlight is evidently still trailing Adobe by a long shot, but the Redmond giant has time to sit this one out, and some cool stuff is being built with it. Meanwhile, some go as far as saying it’s actually evil and MS is returning to its wicked ways from the past. The recently launched Google browser Chrome / Javascript could pose somewhat of a threat to its future, according to some. To be continued!
I hope you like that post!
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
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. (
