The BBC
wonders if British mobile operator 3 has "discovered the holy grail of the mobile
phone industry", simply by bundling some mobile web services together and making it flat
rate pricing. Mobile Web expert Ajit Jaokar is very
bullish on this news.
3's new package is called X-Series and here's what's in it:
Today Silicon Valley company
Fabrik launched its myfabrik online storage and
file-sharing service, after a 4 month beta period. It's also releasing a new service
called myfabrik lite, that lets users share
large multimedia files (up to 1GB at a time). The aim with the Lite product is twofold:
as a solution to sending huge attachments by email and also to enable users to
auto-generate HTML code on the fly, to embed streaming media players within blog posts
and web pages.
The difference between myfabrik and myfabrik lite is that the former is being marketed as a full-fledged storage solution, whereas the lite version is to "host and deliver content". So the Lite version is really about sharing multimedia content with others, via a blog or social network.
Screenshot of myfabrik
Myfabrik is certainly a good looking service and I like the way they are positioning it - not as a boring old storage solution, but as a way to make it easy for people to use digital media on the Web. The tool itself is not much different to the other online storage solutions around, but there are little things that seem to personalize the app more. For example at the bottom of the myfabrik app is a little ajaxy box called 'Experiences'. Click on that and you can label your media files according to life experiences - such as Love, Friends, Event, etc.
Myfabrik is being positioned for use by bloggers and social networkers, as well as creative types. In the pitch I received, it was described as "like having a combination of YouTube, Flickr, .Mac and G Drive all wrapped up into one." This seems like a good ploy to capture that elusive YouTube-using younger generation, at the same time as appealing to Mac-wielding Flickr-loving bloggers.
The basic service is free with 1GB of space - with additional space selling for 49 cents per month per gigabyte. Although when I signed up today I could still get the 2GB free beta offer.
While I was in San Francisco I sat down to talk to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic Inc - the company set up to leverage the popular open source blogging tool Wordpress. One of their main projects is WordPress.com, described as "a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained." It's pretty much the equivalent of TypePad, the hosted blogging service offered by Automattic's main competitor SixApart.
The competition with SixApart was stepped up today when Toni announced on his blog a partnership with enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow, for a new product called KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition (KWEE). It's an enterprise version of Wordpress and comes just a month after SixApart announced Movable Type Enterprise 1.5, which we profiled on Read/WriteWeb. Toni told me that KWEE is an enterprise package of Wordpress MU (the multi-user version of Wordpress) - with additional enterprise functionality bundled in. So for example KWEE comes with LDAP, Automattic's spam solution Akismet and a stats package. KnowNow will market the product to their existing base of enterprise customers - and any improvements that KnowNow makes to the Wordpress product itself, will be released back as open source.
I asked Toni will it be a hosted service? He said it will be available as both a hosted service (by KnowNow) or customers can install it on their own servers.
As far as Wordpress.com goes, Toni reeled off some impressive stats. It gets 18 million unique visitors per month and 70 M page views. There are over 480,000 blogs hosted on wordpress.com. He also said there are an estimated 1-2 million Wordpress installations that are self-hosted. Toni told me the fact that wordpress.com is ad-free is a big part of the reason why people use it.
In the latest in
Read/WriteWeb's coverage of international Web markets, we explore Hungary - a central
European country of 10 million people. The information in this post was supplied by Hírbehozó, a professional journalist
for online media company Index.hu.
Hírbehozó
told me there are not too many startups in Hungary. The big companies like Sanoma
and T-Online tend to create their own web apps in-house. However one success story is
Blogter.hu, which began as a startup - then they got an investment of some 70 million
Hungarian Forints (about US$350,000) and now they have a strategic partnership with
T-Online.
In Hungary, the annual online ad spending growth is around 10-11 percent. In 2006 3Q online ad revenue will be around 1.84 billion HUF, which is around 8 million USD. (1 USD ~ 211 HUF). It's about 50 percent growth, compared to the same period a year before.
Out of Hungary's total population of 10 million, there are around 800,000 broadband users according to a recent government report. In August there were around 30,000 new broadband subscribers, so there is strong growth.
The big news over the weekend is
the publication of an internal memo by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the
'Peanut Butter Manifesto'. The crux of it is that Garlinghouse says Yahoo as a company is
unfocused and has too many product lines that cross over. Here is how he described
it:
"I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should."
To stretch the peanut butter metaphor a little, Yahoo's peanut butter consumption is making it unhealthy and flabby. So like Garlinghouse, I think Yahoo needs to trim down their product portfolio. I'd go as far as to say they need to 'kill off' their web 2.0 brands. But before I explain why, first a little comparison with Google...
The funny thing is, the 'peanut butter' issue is exactly Google's problem too - remember a few weeks ago when Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted publicly that Google had too many products and was trying to do too much? The difference though is that Google continues to set the financial world on fire, with its massive and still growing advertising revenues. Google's peanut butter consumption is actually resulting in bigger forearms and more chiseled abs!
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
A pure TechCrunch goodness
has descended on New York on this rainy evening. Ignoring the rain, hundreds of web 2.0
fans, venture capitalists and sponsors rushed to the sought after New York venue called
B.E.D.
The venue is famous for serving out-of-this-world food to lavish and spoiled New Yorkers, but this is not why the crowds piled in this evening. The crowds sought to be in B.E.D. with TechCrunch, and this is exactly what they got as the 8th TechCrunch party took place.
The party occupied the entire 6th floor - which featured bar, music and slide shows on the walls. 15 presenting companies got a chance to showcase their products to a lively crowd that made a point to show up despite the rain. I got lucky and had a chance to attend, because AdaptiveBlue was one of the sponsors. The party turned out to be pretty good, I made a round through the presenters and here is what stood out for me.
Bambi Francisco from MarketWatch has an interesting interview with Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. Rosenblatt was chairman of MySpace at the time it was sold to News Corp and it appears as if he's aiming just as big with Demand Media. According to MarketWatch:
"Rosenblatt has raised more than $200 million in the past few months, giving Demand Media a valuation that about matches the $580 million price Murdoch paid for MySpace. Rosenblatt plans on using those funds to buy up niche Internet companies, a strategy that several old- and new-media companies are pursuing."
In the words of Rosenblatt himself, Demand Media wants to couple "user generated content with professional content and allow them to speak to enthusiasts in a given vertical." Essentially this means they're making professional content the base for discussions, further "user generated" content, and social networking. The first example of such a website is eHow - which at first glance bears a striking resemblance to About.com. Here's how it's described:
Bill Gates spoke yesterday at the TechNet event at Stanford University. Here are his thoughts on what changes IT will make in society over the next 10 years:
"Changes are now coming faster than ever. We'll be seeing more and more students using tablets instead of stacks of books in schools and in online learning. We'll have computers that can see and learn like people ... we'll continue to see major breakthroughs in software development, in things like voice recognition, gaming [and] video. We're on to new and important advances in IT, just as we were at the advent of the PC.
In gaming, [the] TV, high-definition video [and] PC are all coming together now in the Xbox. Voice recognition will get better ... software and services with improved interfaces wrapped around them will be coming soon. Our new Zune [media player] has built-in Wi-Fi, so you can send your friends music and photos and messages ... we'll continue to see this kind of innovation building on top of what we have today. We're moving toward more connected entertainment everywhere."
While it is a very Microsoft-centric view of the future (using tablets instead of books, Xbox, etc), it helps to remind ourselves every now and then of the high level trends for the Web. The theme of connected entertainment is one in which Microsoft is strongly positioning itself, despite the hiccups in this week's Zune release.
If all goes well for Microsoft (a big 'if'), in 10 years time they will be the software that powers a lot of connected entertainment - just as in the 80's and 90's they provided the OS for the majority of PCs. The multi-billion dollar question is: can they get the same kind of dominance in connected entertainment as in the PC?
While I was in San
Francisco, I met up with uGenie co-founder and President Harish Abbott. uGenie is a comparison shopping service that not only
finds the best price on a single product, but on groups of products which it calls a
'bundle'. uGenie computes the bottom-line price (including shipping, taxes, and
discounts) and claims to "find the cheapest way to buy the exact items you want from one
or more merchant sites." It also offers filtering features - such as Merchant Rating
(e.g. 3 stars), Item Condition, Shipping Options, Promotions, etc.
I asked Harish what he thinks is the market potential for ugenie and 'bundles' in general? He told me that bundles are obviously useful for "anything that we buy which requires us to have multiple items to achieve one goal" - for example a desktop computer, travel, home theatre system. Less obviously perhaps, Harish said that bundles can be "things that on the surface seem unrelated but are linked through our interests or situations" - e.g. an Amazon Wish List, or a shopping list.
uGenie seems to be a classic middleman, but for the Web age - i.e. it aggregates and filters other middlemen (online retailers like Amazon and BestBuy). In order to get real time prices and accurate transactional data such as shipping, taxes, coupons and discounts; uGenie scrapes prices real time and their system has the ability to calculate most coupons and apply them real time too. Harish also told me their algorithms "can crunch through millions of options in milli seconds".
While at
the Web 2.0 Summit last week I caught up with About.com CEO Scott Meyer. About.com is the
long-standing network of how-to websites, purchased in March 2005
by the New York Times Company for $410 Million. Since that time About.com has continued
to flourish - it has 31 Million people visiting
it each month and according to Scott Meyer it has grown 30% in page views over the last
year. Most of this growth can be attributed to one stat: About.com gets 80% of its total
traffic from search engines. Talk about search engine optimization (SEO)!
About.com is made up of 500 "Guides", people who are experts on a certain topic. In a way About.com was the precursor to topic-focused blogs. Only the guides are more renowned for writing how-to articles, rather than the analysis and commentary of the best blogs. About.com these days also has a lot of reviews and product comparisons, similar to a site like CNET.
In terms of stats, Scott told me that About's total revenue is growing slightly faster than their page views - so revenue grew 40% last year, compared to 30% increase in page views for the same period. On the 80% of total traffic from search engines, when you consider that About specializes in writing how-to guides for hundreds of topics - then 80% sounds reasonable. I myself often bump into About.com webpages when I need to find out how to do something. But 80% is still a huge amount and illustrates plainly the difference between About.com guides and bloggers (most of whom rely on incoming links and subscribers for their traffic). It also shows how well About has mastered the art of SEO!
