Top Web Apps in Hungary
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.
Top Web Apps
The biggest web 2.0 service
in Hungary is iWiW.hu, a social network. iWiW means
International who is who, and according to
Wikipedia it currently has over 500,000 registered users with real names and over
15,000,000 connections between them. The site is invite-only.
iWiW now is the 3rd most popular website in Hungary and it was recently acquired by T-Online Hungary for around 1 billion HUF (~ 4.7 million USD). Interesting to note the privacy concerns that arose soon after, similar to when News Corp acquired MySpace:
"Users expressed concerns that their personal data may be sold to telemarketers or used for other purposes potentially hurting their privacy. Because of fears for abuse by the Hungarian telco giant, several iWiW clones and unrelated Hungarian social networking websites appeared or gained in popularity since the take-over."
MyVIP.com is a rival social network site, but is far behind iWiW.
freeblog.hu is the most popular Hungarian blog service. One of their interesting features is a tool enabling you to place audio files on your freeblog site - screenshots here.
blogter.hu is a blog service, associated with T-Online - see also an associated social bookmarking tool called linkter.hu and coming soon is a start page (a copycat of Netvibes.com).
blog.hu is another blog service, owned by the online media company Index.hu (nb: Hírbehozó works for them; he says it is the most popular independent news site in Hungary). blog.hu has a lot of pro blogs, written by professional journalists - Hírbehozó is one of them and writes at http://webisztan.blog.hu. This blog service is not yet open to the public, but they hope to open it for the public in the near future.
videa.hu is the biggest video sharing site in Hungary - again run by T-Online.
videobomb.hu is a video sharing site, run by Blogter.hu.
videoplayer.hu is another video sharing site, run by Sanoma Media Company.
Live.hu - Microsoft has just introduced its Live.com services with a Hungarian interface. Here is an audio file from the press conference announcing it - Arend Hendriks, regional manager of MSN MEA is speaking.
Summary
Hungary is a small but growing market and telco T-Online seems to have a hand in a lot of their top web apps. My thanks to Hírbehozó for the info about Hungarian web apps.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden and Australia.
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Hi!
There is a brand new application. Hungary's first photoshare site, www.ikep.hu, which is just entered its public Beta status. You can upload and share your digital photos, it has got some nice social features (ie tagging, photo of the week votes etc)and a very easy-to-use, real userfriendly interface. Please do check it out!
BA
Some small notes:
- Myvip.com is not "far behind iwiw". Iwiw has ~1.3million registered member, Myvip has ~1million. Behind, but not really far.
- The biggest video sharing site is not Videa.hu, but: Porkolt.com (alexa 2000), which basically international, but it has hungarian main page.
- Iwiw.hu costs "only" ~$4 million, not $4.7
Well, there are more Web 2.0 startups around, those not so successful yet, because they're just starting.
There is dolgomvan.hu, which is a todo list manager application.
There are miner.hu and blogsearch.hu, these are hungarian blog search engines.
There are netpresszo.hu, hirek2.hu, klon.hu, these are netvibes like start pages. Hirek2 is in very beta. There are news about that other netvibes like pages coming, too.
There is web.zin.hu, which is an aggregator on web development news, nothing special.
There are buzz.hu and blogol.hu, these are blog providers, too.
There is noid (http://noid.admc.hu/) which is a special type of shorturl application.
There is milyenvagyok (http://mv.admc.hu/), which is a common blog for bloggers. You can introduce yourself, etc.
There is freevlog.hu, porkolt.com, these are video sharing sites.
And there is the brand new SeriesOfTubes (http://stubes.net/), which is a internet tv creator engine (just check it, it's english).
So, that's (maybe almost) the full palette, I don't understand why Hírbehozó doesn't shared all of them with you (he knows about them).
Andr√°s B√°rth√°zi, Webizen.hu, Budapest, Hungary :D
Some facts:
- iWiW is not really international rather hungarian
- iWiW is not web 2.0 :)
- Hungarian social networking website
(iWiW, MyVIP, Baratikor, ppl) invite exchange on my blogsite:
http://iwiw.blogter.hu/?post_id=40471
Hi Andras,
thanks for noting my website. I asked Hirbehozo and he told me that the Readwriteweb crew doesn't released everything he sent. Can we have some response Mr. McManus?
G√°bor
Gabor, I'm not sure what u mean. Can you please let me know what is missing? I'm happy to add whatever it is....
This is just a brief coverage of the most successful Hungarian Web Apps. Almost every app, mentioned in comments, have no real audiance. Except Hotdog, which is indeed a huge success, and left out from this coverage accidentally.
However, the point is this: thanks to RWW to secure time and space for the Hungarian Web Apps. Respect!
Sorry Richard, forget it. It's your blog and you write here what you want. I just felt that because your blog is a great and important one the hungarian developers became excited about the possibility to introduce their apps. I felt that some of them became annoyed because their website is missing from your post and my goal was to defend Mr. Hirbehozo.
Now i'm sure i saw the situation wrong, sorry for that.
G√°bor
And i fully agree with the #7 post by Hirbehozo. Respect!
"Posted by: Jozef Matula
- Iwiw.hu costs "only" ~$4 million, not $4.7"
Us Dollars not EUR....so its really about $4,7
Dear Richard,
There is a hungarian job seeker site called:
http://www.allas.ma
or
http://www.1Job4Me.com
Tam√°s
Great post!
However we shouldn't forgot the leading FREE stock photo site, Stock.XCHNG, which is also a hungarian webpage.
IWIW is a great tool, but may be faddish in the long-term. It seems less sophisticated than MySpace, but less likely to be abused by spammers. Fake names do appear (Mickey Mouse, etc.), but, on the whole, is clear of much of the garbage MySpace suffers from.
On the side of online commerce, Hungary is becoming better connected. While language issues limit them from surfing English sites, and nonHungarian speakers will often struggle through poorly translated English versions of HU sites, things are changing. Younger people are getting online at work, then spending the extra forints to get access at home. There are still a great many villages not yet connected, but in time, this will improve. I expect in five years there to be an explosion of e-commerce.
Our own company, HungarianBookstore.com, is enjoying the growth spurt, but we have lots of free content (restaurant directories in the US, essays and such) to encourage visitors who may not yet be ready to buy online. Hungarian companies which combine a creative new model, as well as a western-based marketing model can succeed.
A. Trendl HungarianBookstore.com