We had an awesome response to our caption contest on Monday - over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and myself had a tough choice deciding... but the winner of the free ticket to the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, is... (drum roll)
Ali from the Everybody Go To blog, whose caption was:
"Google Human Indexing - We start early."
Congratulations Ali! We'll be in contact by email shortly. For those of you who missed out, don't forget there is a discount code to the conference for R/WW readers.
There were of course many excellent caption suggestions. Others that made the shortlist of myself and the Under The Radar crew were:
Allth.at
was one of the
100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight's February list. It's a
search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the
use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It's similar in
many respects to PubSub, the now defunct 'future search' engine that I was a fan
of. I got the chance to catch up with Allth.at
founder Morgan Snyder recently, to find out more.
When you go to Allth.at, it at first looks like a normal search engine. This is a good thing, as it means the UI is simple and intuitive (something PubSub never achieved). First you input your desired search - say "web 3.0" ;-) Then you filter, either by using the search sources tabs (made up of common search sources like Google, Yahoo, eBay) or by applying graphical boolean filters, i.e. the drop-down boxes on the left. You can add content sources by clicking the 'Add' tab - for example you can add readwriteweb.com as a source (as I did for the example below). And with the drop-down boxes, you can filter words in or out - including clicking on the 'specify' link to add your own terms.
After you're done filtering, you can save your search and choose an alert if required (note: you need to register for an account first). While you can simply come back to the website every now and then and check the latest results of your "saved searches", it's easiest to subscribe to an alert. This of course automates the delivery of new search results, using two methods - subscribe to email notifications, or RSS feeds.
How to build a $50M online company is a topic that Dan Mitchell at the NYT explored recently, taking his cue from Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed. A few weeks ago Jeremy wrote about the scale a business has to achieve to get to $50M in revenue. I have summarized the scenarios from Jeremy's post in the table below:
RPM = Revenue per thousand impressions (including CPM, CPC, and CPA models)
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 had an interesting take on Jeremy's piece, saying that it "exposes a deep flaw in the way online media is currently valued and sold to advertisers". Scott's view is that the real issue is who is viewing your site. Or as Scott put it: "10 million uniques is great, but not so much if you don’t know who these people are". Because of the this, Scott believes that advertisers are getting too good a deal for their advertising dollars.
One
of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another
big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa
describes itself as a "marketplace for Social Lending", where people
lend and borrow money with each other - sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks.
They recently advertised
for jobs in their new America operation (in San Francisco) and celebrated
their second birthday.
Zopa's new CEO is the former CEO of San Francisco-based Chela Education Financing, Douglas H. Dolton. He is understandably bullish on Zopa's prospects:
"Zopa is the most innovative concept I've seen in my 13 years of being involved in loan businesses [...] I expect it to be the fastest-growing company I've ever led, because of its outstanding consumer proposition: amazing rates on financial products, and a strong, safe person-to-person connection that promises to change the way U.S. consumers think about money."
Well he would say that.... but there's something about Zopa as a web company that is very attractive. It is very web-native, definitely innovative, and it routes around institutions that have enjoyed too much power over ordinary people for too long - banks! Phillip Riese, Chairman of Zopa, says about the US expansion:
Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb
Userplane,
the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today
releasing Userplane Userlist - a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate
into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users' online
status and initiate IM conversations. It's aimed at online communities and corporate
websites, but I can also see a use for this type of functionality in social networks and
perhaps blogs (more on that in a minute). Userlist is implemented by inserting a script
into a web site, which gets the app up and running. While currently it only allows single
user chat, future developments include multi-user chat integration, multi-user games, and
saved buddies. Also coming soon is an advertising revenue-sharing program.
There are other products on
the market implementing IM/chat into websites too. However it should be noted that most
of the initial entrants into this market, like Gabbly
and 3bubbles, did not pan out. Library Clips profiled
a number of them last year - and to my knowledge none have been successful. It's
fair to say then that real-time chat in web sites has probably not reached its potential
yet. Another company in this space to watch is Tangler - which is building a tool for enabling
real-time discussions anywhere on the web. Tangler is currently in private beta and
they're looking for more beta testers
if you're interested.
On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search
product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it
the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com
for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January
2007, to the Mobile Web
masses. The US masses anyway - it will be rolled out to other countries and languages in
the coming months. To clarify, oneSearch was initially only available in the Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 package, but as of Tuesday it
will become available on more than 85 percent of US mobile phones through the Mobile Web.
Another way of putting it - Yahoo is replacing the old '1.0' m.yahoo.com site with its
upgraded '2.0' oneSearch product.
In this post we examine the new features that US mobile Web users can expect from Yahoo. Also check out this screencast for a full video explanation, which is an exclusive to Read/WriteWeb.
Here is a simple illustration of the changeover from the old y.mobile.com page (designed for mobile phones) to the new:
The most obvious change is that it has become a purely search-centric homepage for mobile phones, whereas the old site had both search and a kind of mini-portal. There is more than meets the eye though. When you actually do a search, there is a lot of added functionality in oneSearch - that wasn't there before. oneSearch tries to provide context when searching for something on your mobile phone, recognizing that on a phone you need different types of info than on a PC.
Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden
from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in
esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is
likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What
we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web
services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to evolve.
We have written here before
about Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by
exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services
opened up by Amazon was the
E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's
product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and
shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products.
Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again.
With the release of Netvibes' latest version, now is a good time to poll R/WW readers on which personalized homepage, if any, you use. Let us know in the poll and comments below:
Read/WriteWeb has 1 free ticket to give away for the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held on March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. More details at the Under The Radar blog. The free ticket will be presented to the winner of this caption contest. To enter, simply provide a witty caption for the photo below, in the comments section to this post.
Also note there is a discount code available for the conference, for R/WW readers. Click here for that. Incidentally, I was originally going to be a judge at the event - but I am now unable to make it. However I will be in Silicon Valley from 13 April, if you would like to meet up then.
Here is the photo, which I'm sure will provide many opportunities for being witty :-) Put your suggested caption below, in the comments. Under The Radar and R/WW will be the judges, with final decision to be made by me. The winner will be announced late Tuesday afternoon PST.
Netvibes, one of the leading 'personalized homepage'
products on the market, today officially released its new version - nicknamed the
"Coriander Edition". This edition has been under
discussion for the past month on the Netvibes blog, but today it is being officially
launched. Incidentally Netvibes is now using the term "super-personalized homepage" to
describe itself - nothing like a bit of added hype to stir things up! The new Netvibes
edition comes soon after the My Yahoo upgrade
announcement a couple of weeks ago.
While My Yahoo is the undisputed market leader for personalized homepages, with 50 million users according to comScore, Netvibes is the leading startup. Netvibes currently claims to have "nearly 10M users" (an unverified figure). Pageflakes, which recently re-located to Silicon Valley, is also competing well in what is a pretty tough market. Each of the Big 3 (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) has a horse in this race.
But to the new Netvibes release - what's in it? Here are the main additions, in list format:
