Written on April 23, 2008 – 11:31 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo cover really broad subjects, like the one I’m attending right now: “Global Design Trends“. Instead of covering the whole story, I decided to pick an interesting subject that was part of the discussion.
Moderator Aaron Marcus weared his open cultural communications hat
Erik Hersman represented the continent of Africa and shared some surprising insights. He grew up the son of linguistic missionaries in Africa, bouncing back and forth between Sudan and Kenya until he left to the US for college. He is now an independent strategy consultant who writes about high- and low-tech change in Africa at AfriGadget and White African.
According to Hersman, developers should consider power availability, mobile access, connection possibilities when developing a service. “Obviously”, Hersman said, “There’s more low-hanging fruit in other parts of the world”. Though he concluded that there are opportunities in the continent. So, what factors should you take in account as a designer?
He used a screenshot of professional East-African portal Zunguka to illustrate the differences between western and African design.
For starters, the design of Zunguka is plain, simple and far from fancy. “The site lay-outs in Africa are very basic, as the connections Africans use are generally really slow. Most people log in from internet cafe’s with low-bandwidth connections. You might also notice that users don’t have to specify an e-mail address when signing up. Since this is not a digital identifier in Africa. Instead of that, the service asks for a cell phone number. Mobile phones are the pc’s of Africa.”
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on April 23, 2008 – 10:49 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia” Web 2.0 Expo session, attendees were able to ask questions by sending a Twitter message to @micromedia2. As you can imagine, updates like “the man next to me smells a bit” and “Thank god Scoble isn’t in the room..” appeared on the two screens. Yet some folks of the audience managed to influence the topics Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis discussed. They asked for some business insights, and they got it. So gentlemen, how CAN we use Twitter for business?
Brian Solis praised Dell. The computer company follows the Twitter conversations by using Tweetscan and reacts when (potential) customers ask questions or complain about the Dell products. Forrester research does the same thing. “We listen to what people are saying and usually engage in the conversation when we notice one. Other companies like Jetblue, Marketingprofs, Zappos and Comcast do the same thing”, Owyang said. “That’s the immediate benefit”, Boyd said, “Yet the big picture here is that streaming services like Twitter are potentially very big for enterprises. People can follow projects or other companies by having things streamed to them. They don’t have to look it up anymore”.
But what if companies don’t keep an eye on Twittter, like the majority does now. What will they loose? Solis: “The conversations will take place anyway. With or without you. And hopefully, the Twitter conversations might become even more more substantial. When you ignore questions then, especially the one full of hate, you leave the answers to other people.”
Stowe Boyd pitched a pitch concept of his own: TwitPitch. The amount of emails from start-ups who wanted his attention drove Boyd mad, so he came up with a short ‘n’ sweet Twitter format. Now start-ups can pitch to Boyd with one update. That saves him time, and he actually noticed some good ones which he then retweets. “It’s very interesting, the whole pitching process is now in the open discourse. Followers are getting to see the pitches, it’s more of a performance now. We took pitching out of the smoky black room that is email”.
Attentio is a market intelligence company based in Brussels. I met its CEO Simon McDermott a few months ago at Plugg. They launched a new service yesterday called Trendpedia. It is a basic search engine that looks for trends in blog posts and generates cool looking graphs with the results.
Clicking on the graph gets you blogposts from that period so you can see why spikes occur.
Although this IS a blog search that description doesn’t quite catch the benefits of Trendpedia. The Social media monitoring, buzz tracking and brand measurement (mentioned in the Window Title) is much more interesting. Simple Blog Search is handled well enough by Google Blogsearch and Technorati. I see it as a perfect companion to Google Alerts to anyone who is passionate about his brand and wants to know the trends surrounding your brand names.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 8:02 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We love scoops and we know you do as well. So here’s one: Swiss RSS service Dixero is going to launch tomorrow. Yet another RSS service, you ask. Yes! But this one is doing something new. It allows you to aggregate your favorite feeds and moreover, it transforms posts into audio by using different computer-generated voices. That means you can put the latest post of this blog on your iPod and listen to the audio version while traveling or working out. How time-saving and efficient is that?
Luca Mascaro (ceo Dixero.com) & Dafne Gobbi
One little doubt here though: will the technology behind Dixero manage to recognize names, especially the weird 2.0 ones like blurb? I mean, the idea of the service sounds good, yet if I only get non-understandable audio files I won’t use Dixero.
So according to chief strategy officer Lucas Mascaro and Dafne Gobbi we can test that out tomorrow. They’ve traveled all the way from Lugano, Switzerland to launch the service under the eyes of the Web 2.0 attendants. For now, watch this informative video featuring Luca:
Update: Frederic Martin left a comment saying this kind of service already exists. Check it out.
Dania & Gregory Gerhardt from Amazee.com at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco
In 12 days Switzerland-based Amazee will launch in open beta. We met the founders, Dania and Gregory Gerhardt, at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where they are very actively promoting their start-up. The service they aim to deliver is a simple site which allows people to work on projects that need more than one person to achieve their goals. They can set goals, invite people to join them and share their projects.
This isn’t a standard project management software but more of a platform for people who want to reach certain goals and need a tool to make that possible. The goals can be as simple as ‘Clean my house’ or as difficult as ‘Change our school system’. Unlike many other project management services Amazee is being built to do serious as well us fun projects and not really aimed at the corporate project manager.
Have you ever had a goal which required the attention and engagement of more people than just yourself? Then you are on the right platform. Amazee is a free platform that allows you to state your goals and gives you the tools to connect with like-minded people to run and promote projects. Whatever your goal is, publicize and pursue it on Amazee!
Think about your life’s goals the small and the big ones. They are an expression of your personality and they indicate to the world where you are heading for. Show them. Achieve them.
They visited Robert Scoble who made this video of Dania explaining the project:
Dania was kind enough to share 50 invites with us to give to our readers. Digg this post, leave a comment and I will personally email you an invite.
Written on April 22, 2008 – 9:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Nick Gonzalez, former TechCrunch blogger who used to sleep over 3 nights a week at Arrington’s, just told the crowd at the “Intro to Blogs & Social Media Marketing” Web 2.0 Expo session what he considers to be THE best TechCrunch post ever. Well, this is the legendary article:
The honor goes to Duncan Riley, who wrote a post about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. According to Gonzalez, it’s not just the best post because it has more than 1000 comments. No, the main reason is that it brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.
Here’s what Arrington said about this spectacular event:
The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post.
So in terms of traffic Gonzalez is obviously right. Yet I think that when it comes to blogging, quality is more important than quantity. That’s why I prefer one of Arrington’s editorials to be the no. 1 TechCrunch post ever..
Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:40 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here at the “Free Traffic, Search Engine & Social Media Optimization” Web 2.0 Expo session, social media expert and famous guest blogger at several influential blogs Muhammad Saleem talks about social media optimization. Most of what he tells is pretty basic and informative - start a campaign on Sunday night -, but I like his overall message the most: it’s about love and appreciation people! Here’s my interpretation of what he said.
Everybody on the web seems to be eager for some attention, but the best way to get some is to grant other people attention. For starters, write an evergreen post about your specialism. For example a Howto ebook about your hobby or profession that will remain interesting for a couple of years. As soon as people link to this quality content, show that you appreciate this and link back to them by saying: this blog picked up my news, read here what the blogger has to say about it. Or allow trackbacks. Other visitors will notice that it pays off to link to you, and start linking as well. Before you know it, you’ve started one big attention love chain.
One remark that goes hand in hand with the love-thought is that you have to be genuine. Of course you can act like you dig the social media revolution and that you’re oh-so open and honest. Yet if you don’t mean it, the savvy users will be able to look beyond your facade. Also, writing beautiful and spectacular headlines on social bookmarking sites is ok and truly effective, yet you have to deliver on the promise.
So if you haven’t yet: change your mindset before you enter the world of social media. Put some effort in relationships, reward active visitors and content-creating colleagues and participate in conversations and enjoy the attention.
We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.
One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 11:31 pm
Written on April 23, 2008 – 9:55 pm
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
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. (
