Written on June 30, 2008 – 10:23 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Alarmclock:euro is reporting that Wahanda has raised seed funding from Ambient Sound Investments, an Estonian venture capital firm set up by four of Skype’s founding engineers, the investors behind last.fm and a former top executive of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.
Wahanda, a Native American word for “great spirit and creator”, is an online health and wellness community plus e-commerce marketplace where local spa and wellness businesses, pros and consumers come together. The London-based company was founded by Salim Mitha, former Senior European Director - Search & Social Search at Yahoo! and Lopo Champalimaud, ex-Managing Director European Lifestyle at lastminute.com. According to the company blog, the website opened up to the public today.
I’m not really a spa person, but from the looks of it, the site seems to cater well to its audience with the standard bag of tricks: Wahanda has an exhaustive network of spas, salons, fitness centres and therapists and a slew of community features like user-generated reviews, ratings, Google Maps integration, social bookmarking buttons, etc. The site also sports a genuine calm look, clear navigation and enough ways for visitors to interact with the content.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 13, 2008 – 1:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The guys from Skype have a bad day today, as two mobile industry experts from a Dutch town called Rotterdam launched a mobile application that brings free mobile VoIP calling to 500 hundred different types of mobile phones. Wow! This means that users can make calls around 50 countries and just pay for their local data usage. So you’d better use a flat-rate data plan.
The new Nimbuzz mobile VoIP application works worldwide on Nokia Symbian Series 60 devices when connected using a 3G or Wifi network - with a Windows Mobile offering for release in June. For GPRS/EDGE connections, or when using Java-enabled phones, Nimbuzz also offers its “hybrid-VoIP” solution, which counts for the 50 countries.
Co-editors Boris and Patrick at Nimbuzz’s HQ in Rotterdam
Although the Skype-bashing part is the most interesting, I gladly tell you that Nimbuzz’s app also includes conference calling, instant messaging, chat and group chat, and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including Facebook and Myspace. Founder Evert Jaap Lugt received VC and strategic funding since 2006 by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype investor), Naspers/MIH (Tencent, Mail.ru, Gadu-Gadu, Mweb, Sanook, Tradus) and Holtzbrinck (StudiVZ).
My expectation that for a while, this service will remain a niche thing - they now have 500,000 beta users -, yet after some enthusiastic “you gotta try this” conversations, the masses might pick it up. I know that for a lot of people downloading and installing a mobile app is still little too much to ask, but when Nimbuzz users tell them they can call for free, they’ll probably give it a shot.
The most interesting question here is: what will Skype do? Launch a similar new-and-improved service? Might Nimbuzz become really successful and Skype’s mother company eBay take the advice of their ‘Disruptive Innovator’ Rolf Skyberg - make Skype the third pillar in the eBay empire -, then an acquisition could be in sight. Don’t you also just love to speculate about the next (mobile) web?
Written on April 29, 2008 – 9:47 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Boris with Rolf Skyberg in San Francisco
Rolf Skyberg is a ‘Disruptive Innovator’ at eBay.com. Last week I asked him about his opinion on what the future of eBay looks like, what he thought about the rumors that eBay might sell Skype and about his vision for the future of eBay in general.
Rolf pointed me to a blog post he wrote earlier this month titled “is your brand keeping you back?“. Although the post isn’t about eBay specifically it does give us an idea of what Rolf is thinking about at eBay. He told me he would hate to see Skype go and thinks that eBay could easily become more than the marketplace it is right now. If you see eBay simply and only as a marketplace then it is hard to see the added value of eBay. But if you see eBay as a service that provides rich interaction between people then things suddenly look very different.
eBay = exchange of goods
PayPal = exchange of money
Skype = exchange of conversations
PayPal is not JUST the money exchange engine that enables easy transactions for eBay but yet another product that enables interaction between people. eBay’s businesses aren’t just about the *exchange*, but specifically to enable and empower people to do things together. It enables the type of interaction that would be impossible to accomplish alone.
Skype would just be a third pillar for the eBay empire. If you look at eBay this way you could suddenly see them acquiring Twitter.com to enable the exchange of short messags and it making perfect sense.
Read the post at Rolf’s blog and exchange ‘McDonals’ with ‘eBay’ for an entertaining inside look into the future of eBay.
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