Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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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?
Written on March 3, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe - just offer language support - is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Written on February 28, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn would launch its new lay-out today. Mark Hendrickson wrote that ‘these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook’. Well, LinkedIn is not just using Facebook as an inspiration for the design, also some marketing techniques are copied.
You might remember that Bill Gates joined Facebook a while ago, but left as he was overwhelmed with friend requests - around 8,000 per day. It created a good buzz, and that didn’t go unnoticed by LinkedIn.
Because, surprise surprise, the Microsoft Chairman has now asked a question on LinkedIn:
The answer is of course: stay on Facebook and talk with them! Before you go ahead and answer the question, you might want to check out this demo of the new LinkedIn features. Since whether they copy marketing techniques or not, they’re still a good service for professional networking.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on February 15, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Just found this nice collection of Web2.0 offices. There are a few nice stories in between the photos so be sure to read those too.
As you may have noticed we often use these sort of photos as illustrations for our articles here at the Next Web Blog. We find them more interesting than a logo or screenshot. We all like to take a peek into the offices and are pleased to find out that there are real people (with messy desks) behind those shiny, polished and perfect websites. A few examples:
Twitter:
Netvibes:
Facebook:
Digg:
Want to peek into other offices too? Simply search for “Google office” at Flickr and you will surely find some snapshots. A few examples: Microsoft , Apple, Ask.com, Del.icio.us, TheNextWeb office or simply go to officesnapshots.com for more.
Written on February 3, 2008 – 9:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
At the end of last month, NotchUp shook up the blogosphere with their revolutionary new approach on job recruitment. TechCrunch reported about two ‘Peerflix refugees’ who found a way to stimulate people that are actually happy with their jobs to keep their eyes open for new job opportunities. How? They get paid for showing up at a job interview. The service launched in stealth, but generated an enormous buzz. Not just because of the brilliant idea, also the easy way to set up your account surprised some people - users can simply import their LinkedIn profile - and the viral campaign worked perfectly. Users receive a percentage of the money job recruiters pay to speak with somebody they have invited to join NotchUp. That officiously motivated people to send around invitations. Not everybody liked it, yet you know what they say about bad publicity.
We now bring you an interview with co-founder Rob Ellis. He and CEO Jim Ambras worked together at Peerflix - Ambras was the VP of Engineering and Ellis was the Director of Operations - and both have a background in the tech industry. How did these two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs come up with the great idea?
I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch
Ellis told us about ‘the’ moment: “When we worked at Peerflix, Jim tasked me with recruiting a team of engineers for him. It was incredibly hard to find people to even pick up the phone and listen to me. I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch. I think it was around then that the lightbulb in my head went off, and I realized that what initially seemed like a crazy idea was actually pretty smart if applied the right way.”
So he and Ambras decided to give it a shot. Ambras built the NotchUp site and is now in charge of leading the company. Ellis is responsible for the marketing and product design. They had a dream start, yet what are their expectations for this year? Will they actually turn the market upside down? Ellis: “We hope to prove that there’s a better way to approach the job market. It looks like people really like our idea. In the past six weeks, over 85,000 professionals have registered for NotchUp, with thousands more signing up every day, and we’ve around 1,000 companies - including almost every major technology company - contacted us to say they’re interested in using NotchUp to recruit.”
We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent
I was one of those 85,000 users who subscribed because I had to test it for this blog, yet I had to lie about my ZIP code since only American citizens were allowed to join. So I said I was still living in New York. Turns out I can change that now, since NotchUp dropped the focus on the American market last week. Ellis: “We actually now accept applications and registrations from professionals in over 180 countries and have several thousand European members. We’ll be rolling out a much fuller set of tools to support international professionals in the next month or so. We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent. We hope to be able to accommodate them as soon as possible.”
I think they’ll do a good job promoting NotchUp in Europe. And not just because Ambras has a lot of experience launching successful European sites. As the VP of Engineering at AltaVista, Ambras was responsible for leading the development of AltaVista’s international sites and building/ managing AltaVista’s European engineering team. That experience will certainly pay-off, but the main reason for their success is that everybody who uses NotchUp wins. Who wouldn’t want to join NotchUp? You have the chance of getting a great job offer OR you get just paid for your time. Or like Ellis says: “The way people look for new jobs and companies hire is broken, and we’d love to help fix it”.
Written on February 2, 2008 – 2:33 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I don’t know what they feed the developers at Plaxo but they just keep on coming up with new products and services. We have written about Plaxo a lot here at The Next Web Blog and there are two reasons for that. We like their service and they produce a lot of news.
Just today Plaxo launched a new feature titled ‘Plaxo Personal Card‘. It brings together all your publicly declared feeds or “me links” with the aggregated stream of content from Pulse. Also, it happens to be the first application of the new Social Graph API from Google which was released yesterday, as you can read on TechCrunch. As the guys from Plaxo say: “Now you can share with others one site that pulls all of your online worlds together.”
Sounds pretty fancy, and it actually is, since this means that they’ll compete with LinkedIn from now on. They both offer a public profile, combined with a network of your business contacts.
Plaxo has the advantage of offering a public profile and several syncing services, of which the address book function is the best. Yet LinkedIn seems more suitable for professional networking. Not everybody wants their potential boss or business relation to read your Twitter feeds or to watch those Flickr photos of that awesome party last night. You’d like to save that till you know them better. Of course, you could choose to leave the pictures and tweeds out, but what’s left then?
If you keep all those functions, Plaxo seems like the perfect way to gather all your published on-line content. And they’ve released it just in time, since Netvibes will soon launch their ginger version that includes the ‘My Universe’ option. As you can see on this screenshot of the closed beta version, it’s kind of similar to the Plaxo profile. But it’s not presented as a stream.
As we all know, combining and aggregating our on-line content that is now still scattered around different services is THE trend of 2008. Plaxo is one of the most innovative services in that field right now. And as long as they keep that up, we’ll keep writing about them.
Written on January 25, 2008 – 5:27 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Professional networking service LinkedIn announced today that they’ll open a London office. Chief Executive Dan Nye explained the strategic move in a statement:“LinkedIn has seen outstanding growth in Europe in the past year, and by opening an office in London we expect to accelerate our momentum and better serve our users in the European market,” LinkedIn wants to double the number of members, which is now 18 million.
According to Nye, LinkedIn should grow faster in Europe. They have more than five million members now, mostly in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
“I think in 2008 people will start to see the difference between social networking and professional networking.” And professional networking is different in Europe, Nye says. “In the U.S., people do business over the phone, through email. It’s perfectly normal never to meet someone you’ve done business with. In Europe, that’s really unusual. It’s much more of a personal interaction that people want to have.”
However, Europeans, - and especially the Dutch - seem to like professional networking tools. It’s remarkable that one of the smallest countries is responsible for a large share of the LinkedIn European user base. We earlier reported that Plaxo is also extremely popular in the Netherlands.
There is still a huge number of people who have never heard of LinkedIn and Nye wants to target them as well and he has a ‘healthy’ budget for marketing. So far, LinkedIn’s promotion was merely through word-of-mouth, a pretty good buzz and its networking effect . Now it’s time for the not so geeky crowd to start networking.
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