As noted last week, a group of startups are launching today at Mobile 2.0. Here are the first lot:
heysan describes itself as a "mobile meebo" - it's a meta IM service for mobile phones. It is mobile browser based and works on the iPhone. The service is free and features include one single buddy list and a chat conversation view. They launched in April 07, a product of the YCombinator program.
See our full review of this product, a new type of mobile search.
Mippin connects mobile users to their favorite web content, which for mobile means the freshest content optimized for small screens. It has a search function (although a search for "mobile2.0" didn't discover any R/WW posts), and if you find a good story you can share it - via services like Twitter. It also allows you to publish content.
Update: Prashant Agarwal from Mippin comments: "hey richard, I searched for "Mobile2.0" when I did my demo. But if you search for "Mobile 2.0" you guys come up. Stupid, I know, we're working on it."
MobileResearch is a mobile data company; it sells data feeds, does phone testing, etc. They've done a lot of work on device targeting. The Mobile Analytics product is a stats service for Mobile Web, launching in January. Currently the service is in private beta testing.
I'm at the second annual Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco. Rudy de Waele of mTrends starts with an overview of Mobile 2.0: an all-IP environment and application mashups are two features. Rudy has been a guest author on Read/WriteWeb before and his Understanding Mobile 2.0 post from December is one of the best introductions to mobile 2.0 that you'll find. Also see: Mobile 2.0 Startup Ecosystem (Sept '07).
Next up is Tomi Ahonen, author and Mobile blogger. His latest book is called 'Digital Korea', about how South Korea established itself as a technology leader. His talk today is about mobile social networking and communities - in particular the business opportunities in Mobile 2.0.
Ad network AdBrite announced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you've no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers' time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site.
Unlike the standard full page ads, though, the AdBriteunits aren't passive Flash commercials - they are like an iframe or a redirect directly to the advertiser's live, interactive website. Advertising pays the bills, and thank goodness for it, but I usually find these kinds of ads cause to feel pity for the website owner running them; do they have to hit me over the head with it? It's certainly a better ad type than those wretched double underline link ads.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Discovery Communications will be purchasing online information portal HowStuffWorks.com for $250 million. This would be Discovery's largest Internet acquisition to date. The company purchased environmental-focused blog Treehugger earlier this year for a rumored price of around $10 million.
HowStuffWorks has a global audience of 11 million users per month, according to the company, says the WSJ. Discovery, meanwhile, reaches 1.5 billion viewers globally with its network of over 100 cable channels. Initially, Discovery plans to integrate video content from its massive library into the HSW web site -- which has already begun to happen. The How Shark Attacks Work and How Hybrid Cars Work pages, for example, now include Discovery Channel-branded video clips.
"Our goal is to build the ultimate multimedia experience for people who want to learn about the world we live in," wrote HSW founder Marshall Brain today of the acquisition. The purchase also includes other properties controlled by HowStuffWorks, according to the Wall Street Journal, including a map database.
Web users interested in personalization, privacy and increasing sophistication in their applications take note: the Attention Data spec APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language) gained substantial momentum today with the announcement that two of the long-time leaders in the RSS reader market, NewsGator and Bloglines, are joining the official APML working group. Nick Bradbury, RSS innovator par excellence, will represent NewsGator in the organization. GM Eric Engleman will represent Bloglines in the group. Bradbury wrote this morning that NewsGator's FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Newsgator Inbox products will all soon support both APML export and import. Once that happens users will wonder what's taking everyone else on the market so long to do something so logical themselves.
Attention Data is one of the concepts online with the most potential - and the most communication struggles (look how long this post is, for one thing!). Adding NewsGator and Bloglines involvement to the existing support for the movement indicates that things could start shakin'.
This is a guest post by TK Kenyon, author of the book Rabid.
Writing, especially fiction writing, is a tough business to get into and a tougher one to stay in. Generally, neither authors nor publishers make a significant profit until an author’s fifth novel is published. Most of the time, the majority of the meager money that publishers put into publicizing books goes toward review copies and the usually unproductive author tour. How many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novels are published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies. Yikes.
To be in the other 30% of authors, you must seize every promotional advantage you can, especially by using the web and other new media. My first novel, Rabid, sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies in under two months and is currently chewing through its second print run, which is better than average.
To sell your book, (1) inform people that you and the novel exist, (2) interest readers enough to buy your book, and (3) build a relationship to keep them coming back for more.
For all this, the Internet is the perfect medium.
Sponsor:
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.
The week started with some big M&A news in the Citizen Journalism space - Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson said that "Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006." He also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site -- which is great news, because in our review of Newsvine in July, we noted that Newsvine "is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ [Citizen Journalism] sites, often trying new things and design techniques." Indeed we can't wait to see how MSNBC integrates some of the Newsvine features, which Davidson said will occur: "Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense."
Google Acquires Microblogging Service Jaiku
This week Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaiku was acquired by Google. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price. Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - we think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use.
Silicon Alley Insider spotted the New York Times web site displaying reader comments prominently under the top story on their front page today. The comments in-and-of themselves are not newsworthy -- they came from a post on the site's news blog and the Times has linked to comment threads on the main page before. But this is, to anyone's recollection, the first time the site has actually displayed the actual comments themselves on the site.
Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider thought the move was a good one, writing, "Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!" Other bloggers weren't so upbeat. While it seems that the NYT times took pains to make sure that comments from both ends of the political spectrum were represented for their main page selections -- often to one extreme or the other -- and comments were edited to fit the space, I do question the wisdom of giving reader commentary such prominence on the site's index page.
Our poll this week asks what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows. In the comments to the original post, someone pointed to a Gizmodo report stating that Radiohead will sell In Rainbows via CD early next year, through one of the 'big four' record companies. The Gizmodo post wrote that Radiohead had "pulled an about-face that feels like a betrayal and a dirty cop-out", because many fans would've downloaded the album thinking it would only be available via Radiohead's website. A later update to the Gizmodo post said that Radiohead had "been planning on dropping the album in CD form in '08 the entire time." So it wasn't an about-face, although it also wasn't reported in many initial news reports - or noted on the Radiohead website itself.
A lot of the initial media coverage implied that there wouldn't be a physical CD release, other than the box set that costs a whopping 40 pounds and will be available in December. There is no mention of a single CD version on the Radiohead website either. So it's fair to say that a lot of people (myself included) got the wrong message; and paid for the digital download assuming it was the only way to get the single album.
Born out of a closet dislike for "Shrek 2," Criticker is a new movie review community and recommendation engine that aims to match users with like-minded individuals who share the same cinematic taste. Once you've rated 10 movies at Criticker it begins to form what they call a Taste Compatibility Index (TCI) that matches you up with not only other users, but also professional reviewers who share your taste in movies (though, I found that site really doesn't start delivering usable results untily you've rated around 50 flicks).
One of the most important features of the site is how painless they make the process of ranking first 10 films (or your next 100). While you can search out specific films and rank them one at a time, similar to any other movie community, you can also page through randomly generated lists of 10 films at once, ranking each on a 1-100 scale. I was able to rank 80 films in just about 30 minutes by going the random route. Certainly not all my favorite films were represented (I made sure they were ranked later by searching them out), but I did give the site a good sized sample to work with that covered both films I like and films I loathe. Had I been forced to search out movies on my own, my list likely would have been skewed toward mostly films I like -- recommendation engines should in theory work better if they also know what not to send your way.
