TechCrunch's Mike Butcher reports about Turkish social network Yonja's
$12.5 million worth of funding and asks, "What is it about Turkey?." As a Turkish
native, I think I am the right person to answer that question and also, this can be an
opportunity to shed some light on the latest intriguing developments at Facebook,
LinkedIn, Xing, and Ning, as they relate to the European and world social networking markets.
The page view died as an audience measurement metric last July when Nielsen stopped measuring it. In a world where technologies like AJAX allow web publishers to push new information to pages without refreshing, the amount of time a user spends on a site -- along with the total number of unique users -- has replaced the page view as the most important audience measurement metric. But when so many different things can occur on a single page without a refresh, how can you accurately gauge what a person is doing on a page while they're spending their time on it? Laurent Nicolas has a demo on his web site of a new audience measurement tool that solves some of these problems.
Chandler is an open source, cross platform PIM (Personal Information Manager) product that has been in development since 2001, but has yet to get to a 1.0 version. It is being built by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) and has been funded to date by Mitch Kapor, who is famous for founding the first popular spreadsheet app Lotus 123.
Earlier this month, OSAF announced that Mitch Kapor was stepping down from the OSAF board and will stop funding Chandler by the end of 2008. This was viewed in some quarters as signaling the death of Chandler.
Personal search engine provider Lijit, which raised $3.3 million last July, will announced tomorrow that they have acquired BigSwerve for an undisclosed sum. BigSwerve, which was formed in 2006, has indexed more than 400 million comments from 3 million authors. Lijit plans to integrate the BigSwerve technology into their personal search engine product to learn more about the sphere of influence that publishers in their network have.
According to TorrentFreak, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) last week released their latest report, summing up the digital music landscape at the start of 2008. The IFPI claims in the report that for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads taking place. Or in other words, illegal downloading is happening at a rate that is 20 times that of legal downloading. This, says the IFPI, lead to US$3.7 billion in industry losses. But there are some big holes in that claim.
Current Media, the parent company of Current TV and Current.com, has filed for a $100 Million IPO on NASDEQ. Current was famously co-founded by ex Vice President Al Gore. IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) have been thin on the ground in the Web 2.0 era, but in Current's case the money will be used for expansion of their TV network as well as their website offering. We covered Current TV's internet plans in July last year and their new user-generated website Current.com in October.
In the IPO filing, Current describes their media model as "innovative but unproven".
Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.
According to Forrester Research, there will be "strong demand" for web 2.0 tools in the enterprise in 2008. Even though 42% of enterprises say adding web 2.0 tools is not on their agenda, according to a Q3 2007 survey, Forrester expects that half of those will change their mind and embrace web 2.0 tools by year end. In the report "Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008," analyst Oliver Young gives three reasons why he thinks 2008 is the year that "IT departments will take their heads out of the sand and embrace web 2.0 technologies."
Coverage of the venerable startup-launch conference DEMO will begin on blogs and traditional press early tomorrow morning, but here at ReadWriteWeb we're taking a different strategy. This post is the first part of that strategy. Instead of racing other journalists to cover the best of the 77 companies launching, we've assembled a body of resources that anyone can use to track and participate in the event as it unfolds.
From Monday through Wednesday you can read our unorthodox coverage of DEMO here, but for now we'd like to offer the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for DEMO08.
The excellent Trendsspotting blog has compiled a meta list of 2008 Web trends, by selecting "a group of 10 web/tech influencers suggesting their trends forecast for 2008." ReadWriteWeb is one of the 10 influencers selected - using our 10 Future Web Trends post as our contribution. But see also 10 More Future Web Trends and our 2008 Web Predictions post for more RWW trends.
Below is Trendsspotting's image from our post, which neatly displays our picks:
