Written on December 11, 2008 – 6:15 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Loopia, a Swedish domain-registrar is running a Christmas Special on .se domains, for only 9 SEK or €0.85 for a domain name. A ridiculous low price so I thought it would be worth mentioning here! Just make sure that you choose to purchase the domain name only - “Endast beställning av domännamn”, and that the discount only works for .se domains. Note that the control panel will be in Swedish but this shouldn’t be a big problem. Anyway, might be a nice Christmas present for your tech-savvy friends! The action will run for December, and I didn’t got paid from Loopia for posting this message. (I think I should)
Some domain names I could think of:
analy.se
legali.se
noi.se
unwi.se
apologi.se
applau.se
Let us know when you find other great christmas deals!
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Written on October 31, 2008 – 11:55 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
How and why mobile carriers focus on their current revenue model too much and why this will lead to missing out on the emerging global VoIP market.
As you might remember, VoIP technology was initially used on desktop computers only. When these PC-to-phone applications like Skype came out, there were devastating problems for established telecom businesses. The uprising of Wi-Fi and 3G bundled mobile phones are creating a market that did not exist before. Actually, mobile VoIP created a need of which the late majority of customers are not aware of yet today. (Philosophical, I know)
Mobile carriers should embrace VoIP solutions to avoid competition on this emerging market. In practice, they have to alter their income streams from operating calls to data plans. Embracing mobile VOIP would avoid entrepreneurs to take over the market in the future. Instead, mobile carriers are suppressing the use of VOIP on mobile phones. However, mobile VoIP users are emerging quickly, “analyst firm Disruptive Analysis suggested ‘VoIP-over-3G’ would grow from zero to 250 million users worldwide within five years.” The reason why mobile operators are still neglecting this market are general for many cases of disruptive innovation. (more…)
Written on October 24, 2008 – 5:07 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
When will we see foldable e-paper on the street? Will advanced algorithms and Internet eventually put publishers out of business? – Nobody knows… But we do witness a devastating momentum for traditional publishers, how can these companies reinvent themselves? Are they doomed?
Chosun media, showing off newspaper 2.0
Doomed? Not by a long shot! at least, if we have to believe the marketing manager of Chosun. Chosun is a Korean newspaper giant, based in the heart of Seoul. I have to admit, I never heard of the company before I visited them today. But like many unknown Asian companies, Chosun is a prominent player with amazing proportions, newspaper circulation surpasses that of well-known newspapers like the USA today. The marketing manager believes that businesspeople will always appreciate an edited and selected overview on the daily hot topics. And if it isn’t on paper, it would be on a different medium. And as much as I like to argue the contrary, he might have a point. Financial Times recently announced that their amount of online (paying) subscribers is increasing fast. We got a tour at the HQ, and they actually got excited of the Nintendo Wii again! (has been a long time)
Epic 2015
But if you ask me; newspaper publishers are biased towards their believe that a good paper requires manual work, something that will seize to exist in the future. This three-year-old videoclip made by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson try to sketch that situation. Skip to 6:40:
Written on October 16, 2008 – 4:38 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
It’s interesting to see that so much attention is going to the iTunes Application store, don’t you think? When ‘experts’ stated that applications, email and games moved to the web, I never imagined something like the Itunes Applications Store to happen with such impact. With Android coming up, we can only expect more potential for application designers, good news! Granted, we discussed a number of amazing applications for the Iphone in the last few weeks but haven’t really touched upon handheld-ready websites here. Reason for that is that the browsing experience on these new handhelds are SO good – We never had the urge to find ‘n list optimized websites for the shiny gadget. When I got my device, I started looking for links to good websites but couldn’t find that much, actually they are hard to find. Here are some applications for you to discover new websites on your shiny gadget, and please while you are at it, leave your favorite mobile website in the comments! (more…)
Written on September 12, 2008 – 10:43 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Is Google finally becoming serious in approaching the Korean market? Blogging platform TNC has been acquired by Google today; making them the first acquired company by Google in Korea. (who’s counting anyway) TNC offers a blogging platform similar as Automatic. It’s fairly easy to use, and works close to the open source community. Biggest difference is that Wordpress is fairly unknown here, so they represent a big blogging market, being used by a lot of nation’s A-list bloggers.
Chang W. Kim, co-founder of the company explains that Google is the underdog in this region, but Korea is the worlds sixth largest market in terms of Internet users. The Korean users mainly use Yahoo-style portal services to do everything on the web. With the acquirement, Google created a new way to get to the customers.
The exact number on the contract stays unknown, but is claimed to be the first major Google acquisitions in the entire Asia by Chang. Another successful entrepreneur with the copycat approach!
Written on August 5, 2008 – 8:47 am Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Diego Fernández Domínguez, the co-founder of ipoki.com. Ipoki lets you get the most of your GPS by connecting you with others to share geolocation information. Ipoki lets you share your current location with others in real-time. Also, you can see where your friends are and track them on Google Maps and Google Earth. Ipoki lets you keep track of your routes and use it to geolocate photos in flickr automatically. Invite your friends to see where you are and find and follow them across the world.
How did you come up with the idea of your Ipoki?
“We started to work on Ipoki when the firsts GPS-enabled mobile-phones were put on the market. We notice that there were some services on the market about geolocation without its democratic internet version (open and free).
First, we started creating some location based services like put and get alerts fro users around specific places, but then we realize that we need to add social features to our services if we want to make it really massive, opened and easy for every possible internet user.
So, we decided to create a social network based on location sharing. People share photos, videos and a lot of things over the internet and we think that it would be very interesting to share your location in real-time with accuracy, like some pay-services plus social features.
Finally, we have added new services to our social network like integrations with Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.” (more…)
Written on August 4, 2008 – 6:03 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers, some sites manipulate the counter.
Every once and a while co-editor Patrick and I stumble on a shady looking website with a ton of readers. That made us wonder whether Feedburner is hackable. I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!
We found an easy way to hack Feedburner (Not the obvious hack that simply steals a chicklet from a popular site). Looking at the subscriber count at some sites, we’re not the first ones who found out, but we are the first ones to write it down. All it takes is an OPML file, a Netvibes Universe, and a good night’s sleep.
EDIT: While the hack still works, I am happy to tell you that Google and Netvibes are working on a solution to the problem. Steve Olechowski, co-founder Feedburner mailed me and said: “These things happen occasionally and are usually fixed in a couple of days”, he added that the feedburner counts do not influence advertisement measurement. Franck Mahon from Netvibes said: “We are working on a fix to filter out in the reporting the duplicates while still allowing people to add several instances of the widget to their startpage.” When things get fixed, it would be interesting to see the differences on some sites.
How to manipulate your Feedburner subscribers in two minutes
Moral of the story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things up.
Once they do this, it will be very interesting to see which blogs suddenly lose a bunch of subscribers…
Written on August 1, 2008 – 12:01 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Crowd Fusion is a revolution in online publishing, offering web publishers an unique combination of technology and strategy. Or at least, that’s what I understood from their temporary website, the company is still in stealth mode. But attracted some interesting investors and raised an initial investment last night. Crowdfusion is going to supply in:
Collaborative development tools & best-of-breed publishing templates
Google is ready to launch a venture capital arm, opening up the possibility to invest in startups, rather then just buy them. Senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond will lead the new investment part of Google.
“The move would make Google the latest technology giant to take on a more-formal role in seeding start-ups. Intel Corp. has had a large venture-capital arm for years, as have Motorola Inc., Comcast Corp. and many others. In the consumer-Internet area, Walt Disney Co.’s Steamboat Ventures has invested in a number of Web start-ups. So has Amazon.com Inc., which has funded a number of young companies without structuring a formal fund.” (wall street Journal)
With the formal venture capital arm, Google would start to compete with established VCs, the brand and the resources could make the investment arm an attractive choice for startups. The official blog of Google made no mention of the plans yet.
Investments are nothing new for the search and advertising company, as they launched Gadget Ventures in June 2007, and invested in Indian VCs before. Also, Google has made more strategic investments over the years, including investments in WiMax and Global challenges. Google also launched a number of informal funding programs, including contests for software developers.
The new funding venture coul help Google to formalize the investments efforts, and get the company closer to more software created by small businesses, a way to gain experience in new product areas and markets.
Written on July 31, 2008 – 12:34 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Google has acquired Omnisio, a service that allows users to annonate video’s and mash-up videos. Omnisio was founded by three Australians about six months ago. Youtube had its own “remixing” feature before, but had been abandoned ever since. Google announced that the Omnisio team will join Youtube, to integrate the technology in a attempt to make Youtube more interactive.
Another cool feature that the service might bring to Youtube is the ability to synchronize Slideshare presentations. Users where also able to import videos from Youtube, Google video and Blip.tv.
Omnisio is a Y Combinator company, a investor in early stage ideas. They also successfully sold Reddit. TeaxtPayme and Anywhere.FM. Nobody mentioned any numbers about the Youtube deal, but Techcrunch heard whispers of a deal in the $15 (€10) million range.
Most functions on the Omnisio page have been disabled, with a notification that refers to the Youtube page.
Viddix also aimes at the same market by offering the possibility to show presentation slides next to video’s.
Written on December 11, 2008 – 6:15 am
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As you might remember, VoIP technology was initially used on desktop computers only. When these PC-to-phone applications like Skype came out, there were devastating problems for established telecom businesses. The uprising of Wi-Fi and 3G bundled mobile phones are creating a market that did not exist before. Actually, mobile VoIP created a need of which the late majority of customers are not aware of yet today. (Philosophical, I know)
It’s interesting to see that so much attention is going to the iTunes Application store, don’t you think? When ‘experts’ stated that applications, email and games moved to the web, I never imagined something like the Itunes Applications Store to happen with such impact. With Android coming up, we can only expect more potential for application designers, good news! Granted, we discussed a number of amazing 
“We started to work on Ipoki when the firsts GPS-enabled mobile-phones were put on the market. We notice that there were some services on the market about geolocation without its democratic internet version (open and free).
Crowd Fusion is a revolution in online publishing, offering web publishers an unique combination of technology and strategy. Or at least, that’s what I understood from their temporary website, the company is still in stealth mode. But attracted some interesting investors and raised an initial investment last night. Crowdfusion is going to supply in:
David Drummond
Google has 
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