Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on October 15, 2008 – 10:50 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets, as reported on Mashable. Mullenweg writes on his personal blog:
For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.
As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.
Apart from basic polls, PollDaddy aims to provide a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. PollDaddy distributes a new online survey tool and a more generic form generator that is capable of making contact forms. They offer a nifty quiz generator as well. All of these new embeddable tools will build upon the success of the company’s ubiquitous poll widget, which has attracted 70,000 users and is viewed across the web 70 million times per month. According to the company, about 1 million polls have been created and 195 million votes have been collected to date.
PollDaddy started out as a two-man, self-funded operation based in Ireland. The team (Eoin and Lenny) will be joining Automattic and keep working on the product, and they have stated that the service will keep on supporting MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc.
Automattic’s funding exceeds $30 million, which was raised in two rounds and includes notable investors like True Ventures and the New York Times. Earlier this year, Automattic acquired the blog comment plugin Intense Debate.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on October 15, 2008 – 3:34 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Facebook engineer Doug Beaver published a company blog post today about the fact that users of the wildly popular social networting site have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. And since they apparently actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, that’s over 40 billion files.
Huge numbers indeed, if you consider the fact that it’s only one aspect of Facebook, as it’s not a photo sharing site per se. Caroline McCarthy from CNET’s The Social writes:
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
On a sidenote, Webshots isn’t talked about in this comparison, and probably for good reason: CNET sold the photo-sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, having spent about $70 million on acquiring three years ago.
Some more interesting stats released by Beaver:
- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
- We have just over one petabyte of photo storage
- We serve over 15 billion photo images per day
- Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second
No wonder they had to borrow an extra $100 million earlier this year to keep up with the staggering growth.
Written on October 13, 2008 – 7:35 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Attentio, a Brussels-based company who’s actively rolling out its market monitoring software for customers around the world, has updated its flagship product Brand Dashboard to v3.0. The Attentio Brand Dashboard product is used to monitor and analyze social media such as blogs to provide comprehensive real-time insight into consumer behaviour and attitudes.
TechCrunch France’s Ouriel Ohayon was quick to report on the news this morning and also referred to Attentio’s trend search engine Trendpedia.
Here’s a quick summary of the new features:
- ‘Brand Mapping’ technology
- An automated blog ‘influence’ ranking
- Easy project set-up wizard
- Significant increase in sources including new sources like Twitter
- Live Search capability to create charts on-the-fly
- More country classification of sources enabling greater regional breakdown of results
The first feature, the ‘Brand Maps’, is definitely the most interesting one and has been focused on in a second blog post from the company, offering more details.
According to the company, Brand Maps has the potential to completely disrupt the Market Research industry, although they’re more interested in setting up partnerships and working together with the traditional market research companies.
The feature automatically maps the relationship between brands and conversation topics online. It basically takes data (from tracking conversations in traditional and social media) and then plots that information using a statistical technique known as multidimensional scaling (MDS).
Visualizing data in this way provides a view of a brand’s “conversational universe”, as the company puts it.
I’ve embedded an example visualization about the US presidency election, which was also used in their post, below.
(Disclosure: I have consulted for the company in the past, but have no financial interest)
Written on October 13, 2008 – 5:01 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I’m someone who frantically scours the web for interesting new online trends, concepts, startups and projects at any given time of any day. It’s something I simply can’t turn off, I just have a passion for finding new stuff and find out if it resonates with me from a user and business perspective. That also means I come across a mountain of poorly executed websites and applications, or startups that have business models that you just know will never bring in a dime of revenue.
But what strikes me most is the awful names that are given to services and applications. I realize naming is a difficult thing, and finding the domain name to match the name or description you have in mind is virtually impossible these days. I also realize names don’t necessarily have to be descriptive enough to sum up what you do in one or two words, as long as it’s memorable and distinctive enough.
How many people would have considered ‘Google’ a good name for a search engine in the late nineties or even at the dawn of the new millennium? Or Yahoo! for that matter?
Update: per request in the comments, here are some interesting articles on naming:
Seth Godin - the new rules of naming
Folksonomy - 7 tips for naming your Web 2.0 startup
GigaOm - 3 rules for naming your startup
LSVP blog - Naming your startup
Startup Spark - Everything You Need To Know About Naming a Startup
TechRepublic - The dos and don’ts of naming your start-up
GigaOM - A Two-part Rule for Naming Your Startup
Seth Godin - Sloppy naming
Fort Worth Startup blog - Naming your startup
Entrepreneur.com - Naming your business
Name Ideas - Naming Your Start-up: Simple Do’s and Don’ts
Guy Kawasaki - The Name Game
But still, here’s a list of 15 startups I personally think have some of the dumbest names in the Web 2.0 industry (note that I’m not judging their actual service), in no particular order:
1. Adaptive Blue
Develops personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention.
My guess is they absolutely wanted to use the word ‘adaptive’ but were unable to get the right domain name, so they just picked any color and magically combined the words into something horrendously unmemorable.
2. Thoof
Personalized/social news recommender
Thoof. Pfoof. Floof. Any startup that gets named after a farting sound deserves to be on this list. Enough said. Note: Thoof was reportedly deadpooled, but the domain now points to Reddit. I wonder if this was a generous last configuration of the owner or an unreported acquisition?
3. Weebly
AJAX website creator
Weebly has some ring to it, but compare it to the names of their closest competitors (Synthasite, Webnode, KickApps, etc.) and it sounds more like a kid’s toy, or an adult website. I’m guessing ‘weeb’ is supposed to make you think of the term ‘web’, but I’m really not sure. According to UrbanDictionary, it can also refer to a monkey penis or someone who would do anything to get some attention.
4. Yoono
Social link and tag sharing network
Yoowhat? A typical example of a startup so desperate to have a two-syllable name that they’d have picked anything that sounded remotely pronounceable. Except of course you’re likely to forget the name or the spelling of it after a heartbeat.
5. Zlio
Gives users the ability to create their own shops and sell goods from other e-commerce services.
A ‘z’ isn’t meant to be followed by another consonant, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not only hard to pronounce - I personally tied a knot in my tongue -, it’s also extremely forgettable.
6. Diigo
Social annotation service
Using ‘ii’ in your name is never a good idea. There’s absolutely no way you can talk about your startup without having to spell its name for people to actually find it on the web. When I search ‘digo’ (the most logical keyword to use when you hear the name), you won’t find it, but you will come across an internet phone service on the first page.
7. Heekya
Social storytelling platform
Whatever a ’social storytelling platform’ is, it doesn’t even matter if the name ‘Heekya’ doesn’t even refer to anything. I would love to see their employees pitch normal people about their service in plain English. And what’s with the dots above the e’s?
8. Insala
Web-based software for organizations implementing talent development, management, and retention initiatives.
Is this the name of a trendy salad bar? An islamic prayer? Or is it a synonym for Innovation, Customer Responsiveness and Focus, Employee Satisfaction, International Reach, Entrepreneurial Accomplishment and Rapid Growth? You guessed it, it’s supposed to be the last one.
9. Jiglu
Automatically creates intelligent tags for your web content.
While Jiglu on itself is already absolutely meaningless, painfully undescriptive and just not very catchy as a term, the entire product line is named after it: JigluTags, JigluHood, JigluMedia and JigluEnterprise. As if it was actually meant to create confusion about everything the startup produces.
10. Mzinga
Bbrings white-label social networks to consumer research.
Just like ‘z’ isn’t meant to be followed by a consonant, it’s better not to put it after a consonant, either. The word ‘Mzinga’ makes me think of an African warlord, or an exotic Hawaiian dance routine, but it certainly won’t make me go “Aha, that’s that white-label social networking site creator”. Gotta wonder how to came up with that one.
11. Oooooc.com
Provides a marketplace for contents and services.
Much like Zooomr and ooooj, it’s just too many o’s. How do they refer to their service? Worse, how do they point people to their website on the phone? “No it’s 5 o’s, c, dot c-o-m, sir … No no no, 5 times the letter ‘o’ … ah crap.” If you want to be the next-generation eBay, you might want to consider changing the name first, guys.
12. ooVoo
Attempts to add the human experience into communicating online with improved video and voice communication tools.
Same story as Yoono: it may sound pronounceable, but the fact that’s is so damn hard to remember the name and the spelling thereof doesn’t justify picking a two-syllable word. I mean, it sounds like an evil spell or a character from Star Wars.
13. SocialThing
Synchronizes your personal information, content, and friendships so that you can post this information across the social web.
It’s really hard coming up with a good name that starts with ’social’ anymore these days, but if you’re going to do it anyway, why pick something so blatantly generic as ‘thing’? It’s like they couldn’t figure out what their own product actually did, and they just talked about it as some ‘thing’ they were coding. Oh yeah, and the exclamation mark thing was very cool in the nineties.
14. Sclipo
Social learning network for teaching through video & webcam.
Say ’sclipo’ out loud. Enough said, right? It sounds like a name that’s been incubated by someone with a speaking disability. It reveals nothing about the product, which is fairly niche to begin with. Nada, zip, rien du tout. The only thing it makes me think of is the Roman politician Scipio.
15. CrazyEgg
Advanced analytics to track what your users are doing on your website.
This one, like Weebly, has some ring to it and with so many competitors it’s probably meant to stand out just a little. But CrazyEgg? Crazy. Egg. Sounds like they really wanted to have a logo with an egg in it and found out crazyegg.com wasn’t registered yet, so they just went for that name.
Did I miss any good, well, bad ones?
Let me know in comments what you think the dumbest name for a Web 2.0 startup is!
Written on October 13, 2008 – 4:40 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Wix, a developer of a slick online application for creating Flash-based websites, has raised $3.5 million in second-round funding. Luxembourg-based Mangrove Venture Capital led the round, and was joined by Bessemer Venture Partners. Those are the same investors that funded the company with $5 million in a Series A round (together with some angel investors) at the end of last year.
Wix allows anyone to develop Flash-based web sites and content-without being a programmer or designer (example). They’ve just raised a premium version that will cost $9.90 per month and will offer several professional features including hosting, connecting to your own domain, as well as keeping the site free from advertising and promotional links.
Since the launch of the open beta in the end of June 2008, Wix claims to have grown rapidly with hundreds of thousands of monthly unique users, and thousands joining every day primarily through word-of-mouth. Some stats that were provided:
- Over 1,500 new web sites are created daily
- Over 600 new widgets are created daily
- Thousands of new subscribers join Wix daily
CenterNetworks did an interview with co-CEO Allan Bloch last May,
check it out!
(Hat tip to peHUB)
Written on October 10, 2008 – 3:03 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
October 8, 2007 - Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.
October 9, 2007 - Google acquired Jaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it. As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.
October 10, 2007 - Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.
Written on October 7, 2008 – 9:23 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has taken full ownership of mobile content provider Jamba by buying VeriSign’s 49 percent stake for about $200 million. VeriSign has been trying to divest its slower-growing businesses to focus on its core website-naming and Internet security services.
Jamba was founded in Berlin in 2000 by the Samwer brothers (that’s right, those guys who invested in Facebook) and is still based in the German city next to having established its US headquarters in California. In late 2004, VeriSign bought Jamba for about $270 million. On 12 September 2006, News Corporation announced it paid approximately $188 million for 51% shares in Jamba and would combine it with Fox Mobile Entertainment assets.
The company makes content like wallpapers, ringtones and games for mobile phones. It also offers short episodes — called “mobisodes” — of some Fox TV series, including “24,” “Prison Break” and “Bones,” for phones. The company also sells insurance for mobile phones and home electronics and runs online gaming and online dating services.
(Hat tip to SAI)
Written on October 6, 2008 – 2:58 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
21Ventures, a U.S. based venture capital firm, announced today an undisclosed seed investment in CogniSafe, an Israeli company providing real-time anti-cheat software solution for online games.
Cheating in online games is effectively a problem which causes significant losses to gaming companies and harms the players ability to enjoy the challenge and adventure of a cheat-free game environment.
The cheating problem in online games causes game providers to remove tens of thousands of paying players every month, due to suspected cheating. The removal is usually done following a complaint from other players, or after a post mortem analysis of player’s actions. In addition a significant number of legitimate players abandon some game titles, and cease paying, when they feel they have been cheated.
CogniSafe’s solution enables online game providers to detect, in real time, any deviation from proper gaming procedures by the online players, and remove cheaters from participation in the game, thus makes cheating attempts futile and enables other players to continue and enjoy a cheat-free gaming experience.
(Hat tip to peHUB)
Written on October 6, 2008 – 2:24 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
TechCrunch is reporting that eBay has acquired the company that runs DBA.dk, the so-called “eBay of Denmark” for 2.1 billion Kroner, or about 275 million EUR. The company has also acquired vehicles site bilbasen.dk, which TC hasn’t mentioned in the original report.
But that’s not all.
In payments, the company is acquiring the U.S.-based online payments business Bill Me Later for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options. John Donahoe, eBay’s president and chief executive officer says the service is a perfect complement to their portfolio, “a company that belongs with PayPal”.
At the same time, the company is reducing its global workforce by approximately 10 percent, affecting about 1,000 employees in addition to several hundred temporary workers and the reduction of open positions. Valleywag got it right. The reduction is expected to result in pretax restructuring charges of approximately $70 million to $80 million, with the charges predominantly recorded in the fourth quarter of 2008.
eBay is scheduled to announce third quarter results on October 15.
The press release about the acquisitions and the job cuts can be found here.
Written on October 6, 2008 – 1:48 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
There’s another iteration of a white-label social networking site creator in town, and its name is SocialGO.
Much like the heavily funded Ning, other social networking software makers such as PeopleAggregator, SocialSpring, Kwiqq, OneSite, GoingOn, CrowdVine, Mzinga, Haystack, CollectiveX, Moli, KickApps, DZOIC, Pringo, SmallWorldLabs and about a gazillion others, SocialGO enables you to create an online community website which can be ran stand-alone or bolted onto an existing website. Features include communication stuff like (instant) messaging, content-sharing for photos and videos, blogging tools, event management tabs, an API and blah blah blah.
If you hadn’t noticed by the number of similar services I was able to find after a 5-minute search, this particular market seems to be completely saturated, and my guess is only 2 or 3 from the list I provided above will prove to be viable businesses.
As far as I can tell, SocialGO doesn’t bring anything new to the table and is therefore remarkably late to the game. You have to wonder why UK-based Bright Things believes it can make SocialGO stand out in the crop. Jumpstarting the creation of social networks by giving away £1000 for the most ‘creative and innovative’ one is hardly going to make users aware of the service at all.
How do they plan to make a dent in the plans of Ning to become the default go-to site for creating social networks on the fly, when the Palo Alto company has someone like Marc Andreessen as Chairman and co-founder and oh … over 100 million dollars in funding? Not to mention the competition they have from existing social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which offer customization tools to deliver a personalized networking experience for their users as well.
I’m all for taking risks and launching new web services that have a shot at appealing to a large number of people, but where’s the added value in this one? Or maybe I’m just being too cynical here, in which case you have the opportunity to convince me of the advantages of SocialGO in the comments.
(Hat tip goes to MoMB, which recently celebrated its 3rd birthday. Congrats!)
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
