Say what you will about their grand business strategy, there are some things Yahoo! does very well. Today the company announced that after less than two weeks more than 1 million people have viewed more than 4 million videos on the Yahoo! Democratic Mashup, the site that "mashes up" interview questions and answers with Democratic Party US Presidential candidates.
Yahoo! Answers is one of the companies biggest, if unsung, successes - I'd argue that the Presidential Mashup can be mentioned in the same breath, albeit as a short term project.
Here's how it works. Site visitors select candidates and topics they are interested in and a playlist is assembled for the embedded multi-file Yahoo! Video Player. The questions are all asked by TV interviewer Charlie Rose, except for a wildcard question for each candidate from Bill Maher. Because of the huge market penetration of Yahoo! ID, the company was able to extract all kinds of demographic information from site viewers. The company said today that "Thirty-nine percent of the audience represented the 18-35 demographic. That means our debate attracted about 429,000 18- to 35-year-olds. That’s more from this demographic than any debate so far!"
Take that claim with a grain of salt; the July YouTube/CNN debate was reported to have had 2.6 million viewers in one night, according to Nielsen Media Research. 407,000 of those viewers were believed to be in the 18-34 year old sweet spot, fewer than Yahoo! is reporting over their debate period. Either way, it's safe to say that both debates were wildly successful in scoring eyeballs.
The pure web play by Yahoo! had some unique qualities to it, though.
New York based video platform Blip.tv announced today that the company will now host and serve all episodes of the long-running variety show video blog Rocketboom. Rocketboom is famous for distributing its content officially on a large number of platforms and looking the other way when it's distributed illicitly. Basing itself at Blip puts the show in good company and could shore up revenues from in-house high-end ad sales that, despite producer Andrew Baron's remarkable intelligence and savvy, have presumably not gone as well as Baron would like.
Rocketboom first made its mark with first host Amanda Congdon, who incidentally was released from her subsequent job hosting video at ABC just last week.
The DEMOfall 2007 conference will be taking place in San Diego, CA this week, so Marshall Kirkpatrick and I decided to look through the list of companies and highlight the ones that we are most excited about seeing. There are almost 70 companies presenting at DEMOfall this year and information is sparse for many of them. Below is a preview of the companies we think will be highlights of the conference. (Presented in no particular order, links to companies in their logo.)
Let us know which companies you are most looking forward to seeing present and what you think of our picks in the comments below.
Marshall: Dimdim is an open source web conferencing application that I profiled for TechCrunch last year when the company released its alpha version. Cross platform performance is always my first test, and if it works, then this could be awesome.
Josh: I've had my eye on Dimdim since Marshall's preview last year. Anyone who has ever attended a webinar using WebEx knows that the experience could be improved upon (WebEx isn't bad, but there is certainly room for improvement). Dimdim's site currently says the software can support "seminars with hundreds of attendees." I hope it can scale higher -- I can't wait for the day when I can virtually attend all the great conferences around the world that I can't always get to physically.
Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub and it creates an "individualized RSS feed" that aims to filter relevant posts from a set of feed sources. Like similar products we've profiled before on Read/WriteWeb - e.g. FeedBlendr, FeedRinse and BlastFeed - the result of the Feedhub process is a single RSS feed that you then add to your RSS Reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines) or Start Page.
The reason behind FeedHub is to help users who can't keep up with all of the feeds they have subscribed to, by filtering for relevancy. Say you've subscribed to 100 feeds in Bloglines; by using FeedHub you can create a single feed that filters those 100 feeds. Ideally the resulting single feed will deliver you only the most relevant posts - and you can continue to 'train' FeedHub to refine this process.
Mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele has posted slides of a presentation he did last week in London, at the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference. This is the best and most comprehensive overview of Mobile Web startups and product ecosystem that I've yet seen. I particularly liked the following slide, categorizing the main players:
Check out the whole set of slides below, for an overview of Mobile Web startups and big company activity (e.g. Google acquiring GrandCentral in July this year):
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Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. They recently released widgets, enabling users to embed online member directory, event registration etc. into any website.
Wine Library TV is one of my favorite video blogs. Being a "Red Man" myself, I enjoyed the recent Pinot Noir Episode!
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites. Look for yet more great features over the next few weeks.
Compete is an online competitive intelligence service that combines site metrics and search analytics in one site. Compete aims to drive brand awareness, site traffic and increase sales.
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. Keep an eye out for several new and exciting things coming from Userplane in the next few months.
ADS-Click enables you to earn money from your Tag Cloud Widget. You select your keywords and then add it to your blog. The company is based in Switzerland, so great to see international startups doing well!
Light is Web 2.0 CMS for designers. Light offers a full load of web services through a simple, branded content management system (CMS) that makes your agency shine.
Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users. They also recently introduced a social networking component.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Check out the Read/WriteWeb Job Board, where you'll find job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world.
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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Yahoo! Drops $350m on Zimbra; an Open Source, Enterprise RIA
The big news this week was Yahoo! buying open-source enterprise office vendor Zimbra for $350 million in cash.
The company's alternative to Microsoft's Exchange server includes: webmail, a desktop client, contact management, calendaring, word processing, spreadsheets, Salesforce integration and a reportedly strong mobile component. Look out Google and Microsoft! We reviewed Zimbra in detail last year. Zimbra was an early force in bringing AJAX to the enterprise and adoped an RIA model in March, including both online and offline modes.
See also Richard MacManus' analysis of the news: Zimbra: Why Did Yahoo Buy Them?
Yesterday, when talking with Richard and Marshall about Google's plans to open up many of their services that deal with personal and social information, I made this remark: "Also, as an aside, I'd like to express my severe dislike for the term 'social graph.'"
I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform. That probably wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph?" It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. The social graph is a reference to graph theory, which in general, if I understand correctly, models connections between things. There's really nothing wrong with this term, but it's math or computer science phraseology and doesn't do very well as a marketing term, in my opinion.
Michael Arrington has convinced several high level sources to disclose discussion at a top secret Google meeting where the company discussed plans to release on November 5th a new set of APIs. Those APIs will make access to the data it holds fundamentally open to outside parties, starting with a limited number of Google applications and expanding. Arrington framed the discussion as aimed at making Google more open than Facebook but I'm not so sure that's what's going on. There's good reason to feel positive about this move, but there are also a number of reasons to be very concerned. This is about putting Google all the more at the center of our lives by plugging outside applications into it and making it the key reference point for applications that want access to us.
I don't think that a meeting like this was held 6 weeks before launch in order to develop the plans; I think they got industry luminaries together to talk messaging. That's something Google needs some help with.
Recall the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a May interview with the Financial Times:
We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation...The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ 
Zync, a Massachusetts-based startup, operates a local event recommendation engine based around the city of Boston. The site currently lists 30,000 events across 20,000 venues. And even though it only has 355 users, they have amassed almost 9500 ratings.
According to Zync, their recommendation technology uses patent-pending algorithms to recommend events, activities, and restaurants to users based on the input of other, like-minded people. Theoretically, as with any peer recommendation system, this one would get better and more accurate the more people use it.
