I managed to grab socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg for a rapid-fire interview this afternoon, following the announcement this morning of the acquisition of SocialMedian Inc. by Xing, as reported earlier today on The Next Web.
Jason Goldberg of socialmedian
DP: Hi Jason – congratulations on the news.
JG: Thanks!
DP: Do you anticipate Social Median being integrated into the Xing.com network, or are there other opportunities will you be pursuing following your acquisition by Xing?
JG: We will continue to operate and grow socialmedian as a standalone service as well as integrate features from socialmedian into Xing. We’ll also be working on other applications that bring relevant content and increased user engagement to the Xing platform.
DP: The Xing Appplications Platform?
JG: We will be launching and developing a platform which enables third parties to connect with Xing’s network of users both on Xing as well as integrating aspects of Xing onto their own sites.
I’ll be leading this effort to make Xing the go-to place for companies and developers to connect with Xing.
DP: Cool. Sounds very exciting. I remember tipping social median for success in May 2008 when it was still in alpha release. Socialmedian has been built and developed rapidly – what have been the key driving factors for you?
JG: The key to developing socialmedian has been a rapid development process in which we built every step of the way with our users. We constantly gather user feedback which drives very short development milestones. We test stuff by shipping it vs. pretending we know all the answers. Ultimately the user is always right so it’s most important to grow and develop with your users. As an example, our first development milestone was 3 weeks long. We then shipped that code to a small group of people and got their immediate feedback, then repeated that process weekly.
DP: And it worked well! What have you got right, and what have you got wrong along the way?
JG: I’d say we get 30% right at first and then learn the other 70% as we go. The key is getting the 30% done in a way which it enables you to learn the rest from your users and to be able to rapidly adjust as you learn from them.
We got our learning model for product development really right – we put less focus on user interface than we maybe should have, but users seem to forgive you on design when they like (or at least respect) the core functionality.
DP: I understand you’re going to be based in Germany – what changes do you think that will bring for you?
JG: I’ve promised myself that I will learn two languages in 2008: German and Ruby on Rails.
Our software is developed in Ruby, and Xing is making a major investment in Ruby. I am serious about getting more into the code. At heart I’m a product guy.
DP: How you see elements such as Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect driving developments in the next few years offering ‘friend-filtered’ information, and where do you think socialmedian fits into that picture?
JG: I do think that we are just in the very early days of the distributed web and that the portable social graph will be a big driving force of further developments in 2009.
DP: Finally, what’s your key single-sentence piece of advice for a web startup?
JG: Earn one success at a time. Meaning, while you may have a big grand vision, getting on base at first is more important and practical than hitting a homerun (in U.S. baseball terms). Just focus on achieving 1 milestone at a time and don’t get ahead of yourself. And spend as little as it takes getting there.
DP: Jason, thank you so much for your time. I hope we might see you at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam in April 2009.
JG: For sure!
The Next Web talks with Tim Bray at Future of Web Apps, London. Tim gives us some tips for the tough times ahead. He knows that even if he’s wrong, we should listen.
Written on 14th June 2008
4 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Two weeks ago I did an interview with Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4-hour work week in Greece during Greek Blogger camp. The book has sold over 500.000 copies and his blog is still attracting lots of visitors. What is even more impressive is that no (conventional) marketing was used to do so. He describes his marketing strategy in his book: he used the blogosphere to spread the word and to make this book a huge success.
Lets keep in mind that a great marketing strategy is not the key to success, it is a very important ingredient but in the end you need a good product, service or in this case a good story. That is what Timothy did, he wrote a compelling story and what also helps is that he is a really interesting guy.
You can tell that I’m not a journalist, but hey… we had fun. I like to share this open conversation and this beautiful location with you. Hope you don’t get sea sick…
Last month, bloggers found themselves a new start-up sweetheart: New York-based socialmedian. Everybody from Louis Gray to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha was raving about it, saying this service was an enrichment of the existing social news landscape. Funny detail though, socialmedian has been in Alpha all the time. It probably helped that Jason Goldberg – former CEO of Jobster – is the founder. I’ve sent him a line to ask how he has experienced this early coverage.
Jason Goldberg
The idea of socialmedian is to offer people a new way to keep up with personally relevant news about specific topics. Users can join different news groups – currently 653 different ones – and add stories by “clipping it”. Unlike Digg, is not about a popularity contest but more about what users with similar interests like. As mentioned before, this service has been described more than a dozen times, so read more on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb or VentureBeat. So how is it like to get coverage from this major blogs in such an early stage?
Goldberg: “The press we have received is very kind and unexpected at this stage. We think that part of it coming so early is because our product appeals to journalists and bloggers who seem to immediately “get it” and we have a number of them participating in our alpha and they’ve asked if they can write about it. Some of the press is also due to the fact that we’re trying to solve a problem that a lot of people have — there’s so much information out there that it has become very very hard to filter out the noise and hone in on personally relevant info; so, there’s a lot of interest in what we’re trying to do.”
If you’re interested in trying out this new service, I’ve good news for you: Goldberg supplied us with 200 invites. He explains why: “One of our key initiatives is to give socialmedian a global appeal. We already have more than 25 percent of our users residing outside the U.S., our plan is to continue to that trend as we want socialmedian to be useful for anyone anywhere to easily find and discover personalized news of interest.”
Well it’s not just the invites for European users that helps creating a global appeal, an office in Pune, India also sure counts. Or is it just typical outsourcing? Goldberg: “Our team in Pune is not an outsourced operation, rather an offshore extension of our company. The team there are all shareholders in socialmedian and we are building a company and product together. I go to Pune for one week out of every four weeks and it is working very nicely thus far, albeit a bit tiring, but that goes with the territory.”
Although creating another news filter site sounds a bit risky to me, Goldberg and his team seem to do a good job. What I especially like are the email functions. I don’t have to browse to another site or add ANOTHER feed, I just receive a short summary in my inbox every morning. Socialmedian even asks me whether I “want milk with that”.
Want socialmedian to go with your breakfast as well? Browse to the site and click on “create an account”. Enter your invite code “amsterdam” and become one of the 2700 alpha users. Just like 25 percent of these fella’s, you might come back every day.
Last Tuesday co-editor Boris and Johan Schaap organized a dinner for Marc van der Chijs, a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded China’s largest video site Tudou and the Asia division of online gaming company Spill Group. In Holland and beyond, he’s well-known as a true pioneer who represents the almost endless possibilities in China.
Marc van der Chijs, Boris, Johan Schaap & Yuri van Geest
During dinner I had an interesting conversation with him about Tudou, entrepreneurship and enormous bandwidth usage. Van der Chijs came to China because of his job with Daimler-Chrysler brought him there. Yet after a while, Van der Chijs felt the urge to do something on his own and quit his job. “I went from a car with a chauffeur to a bicycle”, he told me. “I signed up for a six-month Chinese language program and started building my first company”. Eventually he co-founded Tudou, and this is where it gets really interesting.
Tudou is one big success story as it’s world’s largest video sharing website. According to Mary Meekers latest data in Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends Report, Tudou (35 billion minutes in January) is 40 percent bigger than YouTube (25 billion minutes). An average visitor, Van der Chijs told me, stays on the site for 47 minutes: “For the young Chinese people, it is a substitute for television”. Competition is tough though, as other major video sites like Youku and 56.com also manage to attract millions of visitors every day.
As you might know, they’ve recently raised 57 million dollars. When I asked Van der Chijs what Tudou will do with this money, he replied: “Spend it on bandwidth”. No other site has a bandwidth bill which is as high as Tudou’s. He said that he could turn Tudou into a profitable business by limiting the bandwidth usage, yet then his competition would probably catch-up. So Tudou uses the recently raised money to invest in servers and its infrastructure. “We’re talking about thousands of machines here”, said Van der Chijs. Moreover, Tudou isn’t doing a bad job with selling advertisements – preloaders and banners – and preventing unnecessary money spending – “I fly economy”.
So take this from a man who knows what he’s talking about: to stay ahead of the competition, video sites like Tudou should invest in bandwidth. And one day, one day it will most definitely pay off.
Raymond O’Hare, Director, Microsoft Scotland, spoke to David Petherick for The Next Web about how Microsoft are working to enhance Scotland’s future, following the Herald’s ‘Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future’ Debate in Glasgow.
He touches upon education, politics, common standards, collaborating with competitors, and has a word or two for "those currently in power".
Photograph Caption:
24-April-2008, The Teacher Building, Glasgow
At Lectern: Raymond O’Hare, Regional Director, Microsoft Scotland
Seated, L-R Steven Thurlow, Technical Director, Graham Technology
Gordon Thomson, Operations Director, Cisco Scotland & Ireland
Kevin Rose is officiously one of the most famous Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. He has co-founded Revision3, Pownce, and of course his most popular company Digg. Somebody with such an entrepreneurial spirit certainly has something to tell, so we asked Scott Rafer – who also managed successful start-ups such as MyBlogLog – to interview Kevin on stage.
So the first question that comes to everybody’s mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time? Rose: “It’s a matter of getting the right management in place”. For example, Kevin appointed Leah Culver as the lead developer of Pownce. She runs the show from day to day, while Kevin makes the strategic decisions.
Digg however, takes a lot of time. Kevin: “Digg is like my full-time job, the one I work on for 60 hours a week”. Moreover, the Digg-founder told that the company is large enough now – 55 employees – for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.
Scott also asked Kevin some questions about the future of Digg. Kevin: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”. So how will Rose and his team do this? Well, they’re gonna follow the 3.0 trend by letting in the experts.
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?” So Digg will make connections and introduce you to other stories that might interest you. Some of them might not even be popular yet. They’ll make those connections by, amongst other things, following the so-called pressure users: the users that have an eye for good content. Based on their digg-behavior, the team can make better recommendations.
So ‘Digg suggests’ is an upcoming feature. If you can’t wait for that service to arrive, you might want to try the DiggSuggest web-app.
At the end of last month, NotchUp shook up the blogosphere with their revolutionary new approach on job recruitment. TechCrunch reported about two ‘Peerflix refugees’ who found a way to stimulate people that are actually happy with their jobs to keep their eyes open for new job opportunities. How? They get paid for showing up at a job interview. The service launched in stealth, but generated an enormous buzz. Not just because of the brilliant idea, also the easy way to set up your account surprised some people – users can simply import their LinkedIn profile – and the viral campaign worked perfectly. Users receive a percentage of the money job recruiters pay to speak with somebody they have invited to join NotchUp. That officiously motivated people to send around invitations. Not everybody liked it, yet you know what they say about bad publicity.
We now bring you an interview with co-founder Rob Ellis. He and CEO Jim Ambras worked together at Peerflix – Ambras was the VP of Engineering and Ellis was the Director of Operations – and both have a background in the tech industry. How did these two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs come up with the great idea?
I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch
Ellis told us about ‘the’ moment: “When we worked at Peerflix, Jim tasked me with recruiting a team of engineers for him. It was incredibly hard to find people to even pick up the phone and listen to me. I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch. I think it was around then that the lightbulb in my head went off, and I realized that what initially seemed like a crazy idea was actually pretty smart if applied the right way.”
So he and Ambras decided to give it a shot. Ambras built the NotchUp site and is now in charge of leading the company. Ellis is responsible for the marketing and product design. They had a dream start, yet what are their expectations for this year? Will they actually turn the market upside down? Ellis: “We hope to prove that there’s a better way to approach the job market. It looks like people really like our idea. In the past six weeks, over 85,000 professionals have registered for NotchUp, with thousands more signing up every day, and we’ve around 1,000 companies – including almost every major technology company – contacted us to say they’re interested in using NotchUp to recruit.”
We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent
I was one of those 85,000 users who subscribed because I had to test it for this blog, yet I had to lie about my ZIP code since only American citizens were allowed to join. So I said I was still living in New York. Turns out I can change that now, since NotchUp dropped the focus on the American market last week. Ellis: “We actually now accept applications and registrations from professionals in over 180 countries and have several thousand European members. We’ll be rolling out a much fuller set of tools to support international professionals in the next month or so. We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent. We hope to be able to accommodate them as soon as possible.”
I think they’ll do a good job promoting NotchUp in Europe. And not just because Ambras has a lot of experience launching successful European sites. As the VP of Engineering at AltaVista, Ambras was responsible for leading the development of AltaVista’s international sites and building/ managing AltaVista’s European engineering team. That experience will certainly pay-off, but the main reason for their success is that everybody who uses NotchUp wins. Who wouldn’t want to join NotchUp? You have the chance of getting a great job offer OR you get just paid for your time. Or like Ellis says: “The way people look for new jobs and companies hire is broken, and we’d love to help fix it”.
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.
This week’s start-up is Mooh, a studio and developer of massive multiplayer games for casual audiences. The games are free, don’t need a plug-in, are cross platform and Flash-based and can be played from any web browser by thousands of players simultaneously. The company is an initiative of the Dutch companies Virtual Fairground, Ranj and Ex Machina.
We’re interviewing Maarten Brands, who has just left W!Games to focus on other projects, one of which is Mooh. He also co-founded a community and dating site for Christians, called Funky Fish and is working as a consultant for amongst others, the mobile start-up yoMedia.
Brands is a creative and strategic thinker who likes to do new things and start new initiatives: “I’m interested in a lot of stuff and I like to write which is why I studied Journalism – but I don’t blog -, although I quickly found out the whole news reporting thing wasn’t for me. I guess my main passions are the Arts, Games and Innovation.”
How did you guys come up with the idea for Mooh?
Mooh for me is the result of a lot of things. Frustration about the way the current ‘traditional’ retail games industry works, the rise of casual gaming audiences and their gaming preferences, the success of avatar-based social networking amongst teens, phenomena like World of Warcraft, the use of micro-payments etcetera.
If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, more people will play community games.
One thing in particular that stuck was the realization that the reason people play Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and why they use social networking services is often for similar reasons. It’s about self-expression, status and communication. The gaming element just give people more fun things to do while they are hanging out on-line and more room for self-expression. If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, many, many more people will play community games.
The whole gaming industry is on its head at the moment, with different kinds of business models coming up and a new type of consumers entering the market. I see an opportunity for Mooh to really challenge current conventions. (more…)
Respectance.com is a social tribute network that offers people the opportunity to honor the lives of their deceased loved ones. Its founders, Todd Wilkinson and Richard Derks, are calling themselves emo-social pioneers. After a fancy diner at Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s house in downtown Amsterdam, I had the chance to ask Richard Derks some questions about this new term.
“Emo stands for emotion. We believe that social networks need more emotion in order to gain relevance. In our network that is remembering your loved ones”, Derks explains. He and Wilkinson came up with the idea after the death of Wilkinsons’ mother. Friends and family told him stories he had never heard before, making him realize that he didn’t know his mother that well. Inspired by this event, Derks and Wilkinson started thinking of a way to share memories with others. The result was Respectance.
Derks: “We’ve aimed at the American market, since we consider Americans most ready for emo-social media”. (more…)
Written on 19th December 2008
13 COMMENTS 
Written on 14th June 2008
Written on 20th May 2008
Although creating another news filter site sounds a bit risky to me, Goldberg and his team seem to do a good job. What I especially like are the email functions. I don’t have to browse to another site or add ANOTHER feed, I just receive a short summary in my inbox every morning. Socialmedian even asks me whether I “want milk with that”. 
Mooh for me is the result of a lot of things. Frustration about the way the current ‘traditional’ retail games industry works, the rise of casual gaming audiences and their gaming preferences, the success of avatar-based social networking amongst teens, phenomena like World of Warcraft, the use of micro-payments etcetera.
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 off, the future of the Web. (More info 
