Holotof is a
network of "advertising creatives", which enables businesses to come and pitch them work -
in the form of ad projects and campaigns. The idea then is that creatives submit ideas for
the pitch and the client chooses the best one to work with. The site was launched in May
this year by Robby Ralston, a native of Peru. Robby told me via email that Holotof
currently has 900+ creative professionals from 68 countries signed up. His description of
Holotof:
"Advertisers from all over the world will drop their briefs at holotof and we will sent them our ideas in return. They will choose a winner, who will get the cash award."
Of course, dropping your briefs is liable to get you in trouble some places... but in Holotof it is a chance to get creative people competing for your business. I like the idea and it seems a good way for advertising creatives to get work - especially for young or inexperienced creatives, who are trying to build a reputation in their industry.
While in San Francisco
earlier this month, I met up with Laszlo’s
Founder and CTO, David Temkin, along with CMO Kent Libbey. Laszlo has an open source Ajax
application development platform called OpenLaszlo - which has been used for external apps
like Pandora (online radio and music sharing) and ishares.com (Barclays sharemarket app). OpenLaszlo was
released at the end of 2004 and claims to have over a quarter of a million downloads to
date. Meanwhile Laszlo received an $8 million Series C round of funding in September and
in October they made a deal with Sun Microsystems, to enable OpenLaszlo applications to
run on the Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).
When I spoke to David, my ears pricked up when he mentioned that Laszlo is building a WebOS. While he wasn't able to give me many details, he did say the WebOS will be a framework as well as a set of apps. Hmmm, the WebOS space is getting crowded! More on this as it develops.
Pandora, one of my fave online radios, uses OpenLaszlo
Lloyd Sakazaki has written a good overview of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis took aim). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well stated.
Over a two year period (Nov 2004 - Nov 2006), there have been 5 new websites enter the top 15 of Alexa in reach - myspace.com, live.com, youtube.com, orkut.com, wikipedia.org. Two of those are now owned by Google, which of course has shown significant growth of its own accord over the past two years.
The overall trend is that user-generated content is the defining feature of all of the new top 15 sites - except maybe live.com, which is basically just a replacement (sometimes a duplicate) of other microsoft properties in Alexa. So whether you call this current era of the Web the Read/Write Web, or Web 2.0, or whatever - the proof of how it is different is right there in those alexa stats. Also as Sakazaki nicely points out, the success of search in this era is derived from the growth in user-generated content - since there is so much content nowadays.
Interesting podcast
interview by
Gizbuzz, with Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely).
They start off by saying that D&S is aimed at "people who need to collaborate and
share their stuff online". To the question of whether people are using it instead of
desktop apps (such as Excel), Jen said that "it's designed to enable people to work
together online really seamlessly and easily - and if you're just creating something in a
vacuum, then you might as well use a desktop and an offline application. But the minute
that you need to start getting contributions and input from other people, then it's
[D&S] a great solution."
I've written before about how collaboration and sharing are two compelling reasons for Web-based office software, but it's great to hear it from the horse's mouth (Google I mean).
Our post this week about GoogleOS led to some vigorous and fascinating discussion in Read/WriteWeb. 87 mostly thoughtful comments were left here, plus many more on Slashdot and Digg.
To get a final, more succinct, picture of whether R/WW readers expect to see a GoogleOS - here is a poll for you. I hope there are sufficient options in it, but you'll notice that option 6 is open-ended and invites you to leave a comment to explain more (at the risk of duplicating the comments in the original post). Also re #4, that's a reference to Robert Scoble's comment that Emre and I must've been "smoking good crack" ;-) There were some even more brutal comments that came our way, but in the end that only showed it was a thought provoking post that many people had opinions on :-)
Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus
Serbia is a country located
in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the
Internet and the majority of them are still dial-up users. The main reasons for the small
broadband penetration are the economic situation in Serbia and problems with the infrastructure -
many people still have doublers, so they can’t have ADSL (despite broadband
connection like ADSL being available since 2005).
The web market in Serbia is developing, but currently there are not more than 20 quality web sites and services. The online advertising market in Serbia in 2005 was 500,000 Euros - and around 50% of that went to the B92.net web site (see below, in the blogging section). This year it is projected that the online advertising market will be 1 Million Euros. However a boom is expected on the Serbian Web scene, because more and more people are becoming broadband users. Also soon a domestic credit card payment provider will be introduced, which will enable webmasters to monetize their content/services.
I know, a predictable (almost tabloid-y) blog headline. But in this case, there really is some interesting back and forth going on between Microsoft and Google currently - especially with regards to office software.
Firstly Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article for The Economist, in which he takes aim at Microsoft with this:
"In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs."
OK he doesn't specifically name Microsoft, but it's obvious who is at the top of the list of "individual companies" Schmidt is referring to. Also not specifically mentioned is office software, but in this case Google's actions speak louder than their words. In recent months we've seen a flurry of product releases and acquisitions in the office space by Google - Google Apps For Your Domain (a kind of lightweight office suite which includes a start page), the transformation of Writely and their online spreadsheet product into Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the acquisition of JotSpot... it all points to an increasing emphasis on office software from Google.
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus.
There's no such thing as the GoogleOS in reality - but despite that, it is one of the most talked about Web products. People can't stop discussing it - and even imagining screenshots for it! Seems like everyone expects Google to get into direct competition with Microsoft, by releasing an operating system. However Google refuses such claims and even makes fun of this kind of buzz. Nevertheless we decided to analyze where Google may be heading with their product strategy - and from that determine what are the chances of a GoogleOS.
We see 3 scenarios for a GoogleOS:
We'll try to explain each of these in detail - then in the conclusion, make our prediction. What's more, we think this could be less than 6 months away from happening.
On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office "flakes" - a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for Writely and iRows. Netvibes, Webwag and others also have similar offerings. Is this a sign that we'll soon see a widget office suite!? That may sound odd at first, but when you think about it - componentized web apps are potentially very useful on a company Intranet. From my ZDNet post:
Along with the increasing internationalization of
the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business
market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin. As
one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod - the site he co-founded a year ago to
teach Mandarin over the Web. He told me that ChinesePod uses podcasting, RSS, blogging -
and other Web 2 technologies - to teach Mandarin Chinese, which he described as "an
emerging lingua franca".
Ken told me that ChinesePod has exploded in popularity over the past year - it's had approximately 10 million lesson downloads and currently occupies a prominent position in places like Yahoo Podcasts.
Visiting the ChinesePod site is a pleasure, as it is very well designed and a visual treat. And the business model is surprisingly simple - subscriptions to language-learning materials. This complements the free offerings - basically, the Mandarin podcasts - very nicely. For example, if you want to dive into learning Mandarin straight away: select one of the episodes, plus you can participate in the discussions. The first level subscription is called 'Basic' and gets you a PDF transcript of the podcast. If you want get really serious about learning Mandarin, sign up to the premium subscription service and receive learning resources such as Review Materials and Lesson Plans.
