Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 4th March 2009
6 COMMENTS 
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Newport Beach, CA – EMBARGO: March 4, 2009, 8AM ET – CircleUp, Inc., the leading group messaging service for membership Web sites, today launched SmartPay, a powerful new service for online payments made among members of groups and teams. SmartPay runs on the SmartMessage Platform, an innovative messaging service operating across multiple channels, partner destinations and platforms.
I don’t normally spout press releases verbatim, but this opening paragraph is pretty good, so I’m making an exception. And I am keeping to the embargo of 08:00 Eastern Time (14:00 Amsterdam). Last time I did that, the US party involved broke their own embargo, but the Next Web was first to receive this news release, so I have a good feeling this time.
I like the cheeky way there’s a “Collect Money By Email™” statement in the press release from Circle Up. I usually refer to ‘™‘ as ‘Totally Meaningless’ in a legal sense, but it signals an intent to ‘own’ the phrase. Good luck guys! But I do like the fact that the service uses Amazon Payments® – apart from the fact I’m not in the USA (of which, more later).
There’s a short screencast to illustrate how SmartPay works, illustrated below:-
Teacher’s and coach’s gifts, group photos, event t-shirts, group transportation, group parties and meals etc have traditionally been paid with cash and cheques – and that’s the area of pain that SmartPay zeroes in on.
And here’s the killer touch:
Over 150 million AOL® and Facebook® members may log in directly to enroll in SmartPay and collect money by email at www.circleup.com without creating a new account by simply using their AOL or Facebook user name and password.
Now that’s convenient. No new account, password, phishing worries or lost password anxiety. Just log in and ker-ching!
This is a game-changer, especially with the first 30 days free. And it’s precisely in the area of small payments that it’s likely to succeed – $0.99 per transaction under $20 is an easy-peasy number, as well as being a nice margin. If there are $140bn of transactions in this area as Circle Up’s press release suggests, then even a small percentage of penetration into this market is likely to put a smile on their face and a few dollars in their pocket.
Solves a real problem – well
It’s also making me smile for the the kudos of solving a real world problem that bugs people. “Service solves major pain point” is how they say it. I can say that as a parent, expenditure on nursery, school, team, dance class, tuition, outings, nights out and PTA / PSA events all would all benefit hugely from using this. And I’d be grateful to avoid the darn hassle of doing it the old-fashioned way. Integrating the service with social networks like Facebook or applications like Google Groups is a very smart move. And AOL members trust AOL, naturally. Being able to use and AOL or Facebook login is not just smart, it’s pushing you towards buy-in to this service.
Negative Points: The issue of limited use outside the USA is still a slow-down feature, but you can’t blame Circle Up for Amazon’s limitations in scaling beyond Seattle. World class is as world class does. I can’t sign up for Amazon Payments anywhere else other than in the US of A last time I tried, at 7am this morning. But I’m sure Amazon will fix that soon.
Written on 3rd November 2008
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
It is never a good idea to criticize the competition for doing better than you. There is no such thing as ‘fair’ when it comes to user satisfaction and loyalty. If you have all the cool features but your competition is hipper and attracts more members then you simply have to become hipper too. No point in pointing out that you were first, are better or have more features. All of that is irrelevant. The only thing that counts is what people want.
Clear, right? Not to AOL Mail apparently. It looks like someone got so frustrated over Gmail that they decided to write an Open Letter to Gmail, on the AOL Blog no less, last Friday. The post reads like it is written by a scorned lover. The only thing missing in the post is “I faked every orgasm”. A few excerpts:
An “experimental” instant-messaging feature built right into your mail service so people can use it to send text messages to their contacts’ phones? We love it – that was such a hit when we first introduced it so many years ago.
On Gmails gadgets:
Adding gadgets to email that allow people to manage their calendars, access their favorite content and best Websites? Nice work. The idea of adding a side panel like that was one of our best.
And they end their post with this gem:
You can’t be all Gmail all the time any more – it won’t be such a big hit next year!
That last one sounds like “You will never be happy again!!!”. Read the whole thing here and don’t forget the 60+ comments under the posts. They are about as funny and ironic as the post itself:
An Open Letter to Gmail: Happy Halloween! We love your costume!
Written on 30th October 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Reuters reports that a person familiar with the talks told them that Yahoo and AOL are looking at each other’s books to figure out how much money they could make together and where costs can be saved. If the results are positive a merger could be an option. Officially this means nothing. Unofficially it means that Yahoo is still looking for alternatives to staying independent.
From the Reuters snitch: “Talks are focused on how to integrate AOL’s content and advertising business into Yahoo, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly because the discussions are confidential.”
It is hard to predict if their futures are aligned but at least their stock prices match up pretty well:
Who do YOU think Yahoo should merge with?
[poll id="4"]
Written on 27th October 2008
8 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post written by Scott Rafer, CEO of Lookery
Scott Rafer
Silicon Valley has been painfully instructive in the last month. It’s now clear that many bloggers are no better than the MSM in terms of “If it bleeds, it leads.” As a community, web startups need leadership, focus, and goals. To hear that message from one of the big names in venture capital, apparently one needs to fly to New York. Instead, the Valley is delivering grimy voyeurism from ‘A-list bloggers’ or transient opportunism from VCs seeking to negotiate better inside deals with their portfolio companies over the next six months.
We are certainly in a Buyers’ Market for startup equity right now, but it will end predictably. It will end so predictably that I’m going to the crazy thing and make a specific prediction in writing. To wit,
Without additional, catastrophic interference, early-stage startups will start to enjoy a Sellers’ Market with angel investors and VCs by the middle of Q4 2009. In other words, the combination of the natural maturation and consolidation of Web2 and the current banking crisis will only cause a one-year “winter.”
I’m clearly guessing — but not without basis.
Calling the Top
Starting in late 2004, I was running around telling people to be out of the markets and in cash by March 2008. My specific reasoning was “about six months before the Republican National Convention,” which was at least as wrong as it was right. I simply figured that the GOP would stop at nothing to stay in office [√], and the Republicans usually persecute bit-driven businesses like IT and Entertainment in favor of atom-driven businesses like Autos, Telecom services, and Petrochemical.
My more general reasoning was that IT boom-and-bust cycles have been between 8 to 11 years long since the early 1960s. March 2008 was exactly 8 years from the top of the last IT cycle, i.e. the DotCom boom. However, this cycle was marginally the shortest ever, and I called the Web2 Top w_a_y too close for my own comfort.
I don’t believe in exact market timing and was hoping my March 2008 deadline was a bit before the Top, but it was actually after. GOOG and NASDAQ both hit their highs around November 1, 2007, and the Bebo-AOL deal was announced on March 13, 2008. That deal felt late and overpriced at the time, and it probably still will with the passage of time.
Calling the Bottom
Nobody seems to remember it well, but the dotcom community was clearly climbing out of its Bust in Q3 2001, less than 18 months after the DotCom Top. Wi-Fi and blogging, the harbingers of Web2, were well into their early adopter phase. That quarter, Oren Michels and I launched WiFinder on stage at Demo. We got off to a great start PR-wise too, largely by pitching Glenn Fleischman and the bloggers who already owned the public discourse on Wi-Fi.
Of course, WiFinder launched September 5, 2001, six days before the world-beyond-tech shut down for a while. Even that extension into “nuclear winter” as people call it, was eighteen months or less. Friendster launched March 2002 and the first bulge of Web2 startups had been founded by spring 2003 and had little trouble finding angel investment. O’Reilly coined the term “Web2″ in Spring 2004 to describe what he saw as an existent, emerging sector.
Large shocks extend the tech down cycle, but not for very long. 9/11 extended the post-dotcom Buyers’ Market by eighteen months. I’m betting the banking-shock extension is twelve. The Top was almost exactly a year ago, and Sellers’ Market start to re-emerge around this time next year.
Separating the Cycles
Any number of credible people will make the above statements, but then they come to very different conclusions. In these panicky times, many experts are unnecessarily and unreasonably conflating unlike economic cycles. When you make that error, it looks like web startups will take as long to recover as global banking. That’s not the way it works.
IT startups don’t run on credit, and they don’t correlate directly the GDP. IT startup recovery leads GDP recovery significantly. We don’t behave like big tech companies such as GOOG, YHOO, ORCL, MSFT, etc. who need to care a lot about the state of the overall economy. Their revenue is driven by big corporate spending. Ours normally isn’t. That’s one of the reasons the big guys are late to the pick up the latest technologies. Two guys in a garage with a new way to share music, or even startups at Twitter’s scale, don’t care at all. Facebook and Automattic, where I have a few shares, are in an interesting middle-state from this point of view. If they manage the transition a tenth as well as Google did during the Dotcom Bust, they will be huge wins.
The Buyers’ Market for startup equity is never more than a quarter of the overall cycle, and it’s normally more like a sixth. Early-stage investors won’t wait for the economy or housing or banking to recover. A bunch of rich people are frantic right now because their personal portfolios are getting hit. However, pretty soon they’ll remember that those portfolios only exist because they paid a startup to give away web-based email, sold AKAM at $300/share or some other highly speculative IT-investing activity.
At that moment, they’ll move back from fear to greed and start competing with each other to speculate — on us.
Written on 30th September 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Widget distributor Clearspring has acquired AddThis, a popular social bookmarking tool, for an undisclosed amount of money. “AddThis is the biggest little thing on the Web,” Clearspring Chief Executive Hooman Radfar told Reuters.
Clearspring is a widget syndication service that connects web publishers and advertisers to the social 2.0 crowd out there. All 10,000 registered web publishers can easily create widgets, distribute them to users and then track and monetize the nifty little things. Examples are basketball fans who place a widget containing the stats of their favorite player on their Facebook profile.
You probably know AddThis from the little buttons beneath blog posts, with which you can easily share the content with friends, family, and the rest of the world. According to HitWise, AddThis is more popular than Yahoo, Delicious, or ShareThis.com.
Clearspring raised a total amount of $36 million in the last two years, with a round of $18 million four months ago, thus an acquisition of a service that complement theirs isn’t too surprising. Although we’ll probably see the same reactions as when Sphere got acquired by AOL for about $25 million: are those little buttons actually a business?
Written on 1st September 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Bebo represents AOL’s hope to have a successful social network, just like the other big guys. Truth be told, Bebo is quite a large player. It has 40 million users and may call itself no.1 in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In the US is has a respectable third place behind MySpace and Facebook.
But still, the service isn’t big in the rest of the Western web. No top positions in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Holland. Therefor, Bebo has hired former Google industry marketing head Nicole Vanderbilt to fulfill the new role of international VP.
According to the Guardian, Vanderbilt has to conquer exactly these countries I mentioned before. Not an easy task, as the European social network market seems to be pretty filled out. It’s basically divided in three parts:
- National giants: StudiVZ (12.2 million users in Germany) and Hyves (5 million users in Holland)
- Networks that spread out over several countries: Bahu (popular in Mediterranean region) and Netlog (35 million users in June)
- Facebook and Myspace: the higher educated folks who’ve worked or traveled abroad join Facebook, the creative people Myspace. Most Europeans use these networks on the side.
It will be a tough challenge for Vanderbilt to find a place in this market. How will she be able to convince us Europeans to join ANOTHER social network? Focusing on a niche or certain target group, hoping the Bebo virus will catch on or rolling out a massive ad campaign seem to be the only two ways. Good luck.
Written on 7th June 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
AOL used to be world’s largest walled garden. Yet shortly after they were incorporated by Times Warner, the walls collapsed and the majority of garden visitors left. But during the past few years, the gardener has acquired quite a number of companies – like Bebo, Buy.at and Goowy media. All these web services have thing in common: they’re focused on advertising. Within a very short while, AOL has become an important advertising company. Now it’s time for the former Internet giant to bring structure into the company.
AOL Mountain View Office
The AOL executives started Platform-A for that task last September. This division houses ad sales for all its sites, ad network properties and supporting technologies. Platform-A has integrated sales for Advertising.com, AOL-run sites, Tacoda, Third Screen Media and AdTech. After cleaning up the house in the U.S., Platform-A now continues in Europe.
AOL will merge its existing European advertising subsidies – Advertising.com, Adtech, and buy.at – into Platform-A’s international operations. The European HQ is based in London and former Advertising.com international head Brendan Condon will be in charge. He can offer its American customers a more global appeal by placing their ads on European websites. With more social networks becoming global entities, advertisers will surely welcome this move by AOL.
Written on 11th April 2008
5 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Yahoo News is reporting that Yahoo & Time Warner are getting close to doing a deal leaving Microsoft behind. This is far from confirmed but an interesting development in this ongoing story. From the Yahoo! News article:
“The source confirmed a Wall Street Journal story saying Yahoo would receive a cash investment from Time Warner in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the combined Yahoo-AOL business. The deal would exclude AOL’s fading dial-up Internet access business and value AOL at about $10 billion.
A deal with Time Warner and AOL would be part of a multi-pronged strategy by Yahoo in which it would outsource Web search advertising operations to Google Inc (GOOG.O), the source said.”
Many readers will prefer anything above Microsoft when it comes to Yahoo and an acquisition but I’m not sure I actually like the prospect of an AOL/Yahoo merger. Once a market leader, AOL is now known more for its lack of innovation and strategic mistakes when it comes to predicting the future of the web.
AOL has the appearance of a sleeping giant.
At least Microsoft is aggressive…
Written on 13th March 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
AOL is continuing its buying spree by acquiring Bebo. Reuters reports that Time Warner’s Internet division bought the social network for 850 million US dollars, in cash.
Bebo has 40 million users and may call itself no.1 in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In the US is has a respectable third place behind MySpace and Facebook.
“Bebo’s dynamic management team recognizes that the Internet is less about destination and more about connecting people, culture and lifestyles,” AOL President Ron Grant said in a statement. I’ll translate it for you: Now we can target the adds of recently bought online affiliate marketing network Buy.at and the widgets of Goowy Media even better! Moreover, we’re catching up with Microsoft again!
One thing is for sure though, thanks to mother company Time Warner, AOL is making a remarkable comeback as an Internet giant.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
Written on 6th February 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Looks like Microsoft woke up AOL with their bid on Yahoo. The smaller rival has acquired two companies in two days. On February 4th they turned a long partnership with widget company Goowy Media into an acquisition and yesterday they bought online affiliate marketing network Buy.at. Both acquired companies are Ads-related, so I think we can say AOL is looking for ways to monetize their free services.
Goowy makes it possible for users to create widgets and monitor them. They also have a gallery of widgets for consumers, who can place them on blogs, social network profiles, desktops and personalized start pages. With the acquisition, AOL secures itself of a division that is a strong force in the widget market.
Buy.at is a network in which advertisers pay its web publishing members only when a click on an ad leads to an action, such as buying a product. It used to be domain redirect service that owned domains like stay.at, download.at, play.at and, officiously, buy.at.
Companies like AOL, such as Altavista, fascinate me. They used to be Internet giants who founded services that learned us to use the Internet. Almost everybody started their Internet adventures at one of these two companies. But now, Altavista seems to have vanished in the search marketing division of Yahoo, yet AOL is still alive and kicking with five acquisitions in 12 months. Probably because their mother company Time Warner sees it like an advertise spin-off of their cable company. Yahoo apparently uses Altavista’s knowledge, but isn’t promoting the brand. The last press info was released five years ago.
One of the few survivors, Yahoo, is now likely to be acquired as well. Strange, for such a young medium, Internet arouses a helluva lot nostalgic feelings.
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