Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on January 9, 2009 – 11:20 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Germany’s no. 1 blogger Robert Basic: “I’m selling my blog!”. After a hundred blog posts, comments, a GPR increase of 2, and extra ad revenue. “Oh, you know what, I love my blog so much. I won’t sell it! Thanks for your support though”.
Whether he’s the Scoble or Arrington of Germany, one thing is for sure. Robert Basic knows how to get attention. After a few years of successful blogging - last month Basic Thinking attracted 85,000 unique visitors and served 254,000 page views -, he decided to put up his blog on eBay (expecting to receive an amount between €10k and €100k). Allegedly because he wants to “start from scratch again”.
Yet some sources believe it’s just another trick from Basic’s sleeve. Linkbaiting so you will. If that really is the case, Basic did a great job. The auction goes on for six more days, he already has coverage from major blogs (including an article from Robin Wauters on TechCrunch).
The question is, can he resist the temptation of just taking the money and run? The score already is €20.150,00. Let’s see what happens!
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Written on December 14, 2008 – 12:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
It’s funny and sad. The tech scene is an industry where people travel the whole world for conferences and meet-ups, so you’d expect most to be global citizens. McLuhan’s global village and all that. Yet right after Europe’s largest web conference, almost everybody who has the guts to speak up is ranting about each other’s countries.
A-listers start a discussion - Michael Arrington criticizes Europe’s work ethic, Loren Feldman “bans” France, Loic Le Meur finds himself defending Europe all the time -, and a large group of followers starts to bash anyone whose not from their country.
In the TechCrunch discussion, it took about twenty comments when Godwin’s law was once again proved. At Loren Feldman’s, some people used vivid and hostile examples to fight prejudice: I’m French and you’re right, I shower only once a week. Right after I bang your wife. Plus, in the heat of the discussion, Loic le Meur and Michael Arrington just broke up.
Screw all that.
I’m lucky to work for this blog. The Next Web team send me all over the world. Everywhere I came, from London, San Francisco, Geneva, Paris, Krakow, Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai, and even crazy Kathmandu - I found people to level with. Guys and girls who are working to make their dreams come true.
Maybe they’re taking a two hour lunch - but they might as well skip some sleep to work.
Maybe their English is terrible, but they’re helping out millions of people world-wide who speak the same language.
Maybe they don’t have a passport, but thanks to the web they appear more like global citizens to me than most tech people.
Written on December 13, 2008 – 2:40 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
There is a juicy post up on Techcrunch you should definitely check out. It is titled “Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch” and in it Michael Arrington looks back at Le Web ‘08 and shares an observation with us. I quote:
“the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies”
There are 100+ comments from mostly Europeans who feel attacked by the comparison. Read the article but make sure you check out those comments too!
Written on December 10, 2008 – 1:30 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Marissa Mayer is the second Google big shot who gives acte de presence at Le Web. After Nikesh Arora
SVP, Google and President, EMEA Operations it’s up to the Google Vice President Search Products and User Experience. She’ll be interviewed by a man who has already seated the comfortable white couches when he interviewed the MySpace COO.
Mayer has an impressive track record. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer (and employee number 1 she explained during the Q&A) and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Not to mention the several Artificial Intelligence patents she has filed.
Arrington’s first question was at Loic: “Will there be enough food for people today”
His second question: “Who has internet connectivity today?”
Ouch.
Then the interview takes off. Marissa has news today. Googles Zeitgeist will be launched with a more global focus showing global trends which can be viewed per country too.
The second product (unannounced until now) are more themes for iGoogle. Euh, okay. Themes. very exciting.
Then the conversation shifts to Chrome. Marissa gives an update on their goals: stability, more operating systems, etc. No word on what market size they have now.
On Betas: software can be in beta but has to move out of beta soon. Web services are different and might stay in beta for years. For chrome it is very important to get out of beta soon.
On Google Search Wiki: Arrington goes into a rant on how awful it is. Marissa explains the concept and highlights the benefits. Arrington talks about the spam comments. They see it as a more personal way to search. They are now able to enhance results because you vote up or down existing results. Why not let people opt out, arrington asks. Marissa thinks that option will appear. Arrington wants to know when that option will go live. Beginning of next year Marissa promises. They might one day use aggregated votes to influence results. But not too soon.
On Market share: Arrington says “Search is horrible now”. So how is Google going to improve? What is next? What is the next level of share? What is the future of search? Marissa answer that competition is good and she likes it. There are lots of ways to improve search: they seem to focus on different ways of accessing search input. Via voice, from you car, from your phone, stuff like that. They also want to offer more than just the 10 best results but actually answer the question the user has. Moving away from keyword searches and improving on understanding what people want seem to be key there.
On visual recognition: Arrington asks: Is there a secret search engine that does everything (better search, recognition etc) which Google is holding back? Marissa just smiles. :-)
On personalization: they get best results by tracking what you clicked and combining that with your location. The scoial aspect is another important point. Everything you might ask during a conference in another country are social questions (where to eat, drink sleep) and using your social network for that will greatly increase quality of results.
On local search: Arrington: there is no local search that works. She answers that local search is a big thing for Google. Ecommerce is great but buying local is better for everything. Better for local economies, the environment and your connection to your local communities. They want to expand into that and see a huge opportunity in local search.
After that we had a few questions (using iPhone search with different accents, how do you grow Google with so many people there, ) from the audience which were very interesting but not interesting enough for me to repeat here.
My general perception of the interview is that Marissa was more open about Google than we have seen her in other interviews. Also less aggressive in protecting Google’s ideas and more open to criticism. Marissa even talked, although vaguely, about future products and services something which she always seemed to stay away from. She even told a personal story about what she felt the first time she walked into a cyber cafe and noticed someone using ‘her’ search engine. Great stuff!
Written on December 9, 2008 – 10:46 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Amit Kapur, Chief Operating Officer of MySpace, is on the Le Web stage right now. So far, he had a quite glorious career at MySpace. He joined the company as the first person to boost business development and did a good job at creating revenue streams (e.g. the $900M Google deal) and partnering up with giants like Sony BMG. Kapur currently oversees MySpace’s global operations.
Kapur in happier times
But right now, I feel sorry for the man. He’s about to get interviewed by one of tech world’s toughest cookies, Michael Arrington. That TechCrunch guy. Let’s see what happens.
Off the record
Before the interview started, Kapur must have been pretty excited though, as he has the honor to announce a new MySpace feature. After chatting with Arrington for a while, “MySpace users are not stupid, not uneducated and not poor” and “MySpace music streams a couple of hundred million songs a day. But that’s off the record”, Kapur was ready for the BIG announcement. Hold on to yourself.
MySpace launches a MySpace toolbar which makes it possible to carry MySpace along with you while browsing the web. Yes, that means you can search, check status messages, look up your friends, whatever. But there’s one thing you can’t: playing music! The reason? Bad for advertising revenue. Kapur: “We’re launching products that have the right balance between user experience and monetization. In that perspective, we haven’t found a way for playing music in the toolbar yet.”
The toolbar is only available for Windows users, Mac comes later. I. Can’t. Wait.
Written on October 27, 2008 – 1:25 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Until two weeks ago, you’d regularly find articles of Robin Wauters on The Next Web Blog. The last post the next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer wrote, was titled Matt Mullenweg snaps up PollDaddy. The next day, Michael Arrington snapped up Robin Wauters. Yes, our Belgian editor got promoted to TechCrunch. Goodbye, farewell and trackback!
Well, yesterday I received the first trackback from Wauters, now it’s my time to return the favor. Not just because he’s a great guy, but mostly because he discovered a cool tool: Usernamecheck.com.
It took me or two or three usernames before I realized it’s better to have one. Not just because it’s easier to remember, but also for personal branding matters. So I chose “dutchproblogger”. I’m sure you have an alias as well: Usernamecheck allows you to see whether that nickname is still available on 68 services.
According to TechCrunch commenters, the service isn’t functioning perfectly, yet you’ll get the idea anyhow.
As you can see, I suck at registering with the right username, some are more fanatic about it:
So be ahead of the “asswipes” out there and fill in the blanks, a.s.a.p.!
Written on October 21, 2008 – 12:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.
This is what Michael Arrington wrote three days ago in a post titled “Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader“. We’re glad to bring you the story behind this “destruction”, since multiple sources who are really close to Bloglines told us the two main reasons for Bloglines’ downfall. On one condition, they want to remain anonymous.
Arrington wrote the post as he noticed a tweet by Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher. He founded the service in 2003, sold it two years later to Ask.com, and now, three years later, he’s thinking of switching to Google Reader:
Ask.com want’s to get rid of Bloglines
The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including TechCrunch (and you don’t want to piss them off). There are basically two reasons for this: a lack of commitment from Ask.com and a somewhat unfortunate outsourcing experiment.
According to our sources, Ask.com put Bloglines up for sale earlier this year, in an effort to cut costs. The company was expecting an auction to take place in August, but these plans sort of vanished as nobody seems to be aware about it.
When you look at Ask.com’s recent strategic moves, anyone can tell that it’s aiming for a larger share in the search market. Mainly by adopting technologies that several alternative search engines have successfully launched (e.g. related searches and clustering results). Oh, and don’t forget about the sexy ads. As it looks now, we can also add cutting costs to the company strategy.
Outsourcing Bloglines to China
Part of that is outsourcing the Bloglines development to China, our sources told us. Thanks to Twitter Search, we’ve found some confirmation. Ex-Bloglines engineer Paul Querna told Mark Fletcher via Twitter that “Ask.com moved all of the bloglines engineering to china, what did you expect :P”.
This cutting move apparently didn’t work out, as Bloglines’ problems still haven’t been fixed. It’s sad to see what can become of a promising start-up when a mother company doesn’t have a heart for it (Jaiku, anyone?).
Written on September 6, 2008 – 9:04 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
This is a guest post by mobile marketeer Peter Evers based in London who frequently blogs about mobile on peterevers.net.
After working in mobile marketing for quite some time, recently a friend challenged me to think of a business plan for his mobile startup MaptheGap. His plan was either to sell his company or making money by selling pro accounts.
I think choosing the sell out strategy is one of the most common mistakes startups make. They hope to make their service so appealing that a big player has no choice but to acquire them. What if that’s not happening? Well, then you run out of money sooner or later, go bankrupt, and your startup has stayed a startup forever. In these times of economic slowdown it seems a pretty risky strategy.
Another failing strategy is to start with a pro account right away. So you’re launching a new service, but you prevent your very first users from using the full functionalities of your service? Since the first phase is mostly about convincing people to actually use your service, this will lead more to frustrated users than to money in the bank. Besides, a lot has been written and said about everything becoming free anyway.
So, what would be viable business plans to make your mobile service profitable? I have summed up three business strategies, which do not exclude each other, to earn money with a mobile service.
- Advertising - Very obvious, but still a lot of startups think of it as the a-word. They are too afraid to upset their userbase. But aren’t we all still watching tv and reading newspapers? Advertising doesn’t bother people as long as it doesn’t interfere with the usability of your service. Besides, the techniques to target ads on specific characteristics of your users and their location are pretty advanced, so your users might even think of the ads as helpful.
- White labeling - A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company and rebranded by another company to make it appear as if it’s theirs. In terms of a mobile service, it means that you license the technique of your service to another company for a fixed fee, so they can rebrand your service as their own at an event (fair, release party etc.), offer it to their customers or on a bunch of other occasions.
- Licensing - By far the best way to grow a big audience, which obviously boosts your advertising sales, is to get your service preloaded on people’s phones. So your service is on their phone before they have even thought about buying it. This is hard, you’ll need to speak to phone manufacturers and they’ll need approval of the operators who sell their phones, but will certainly mean a big breakthrough for your service. Since the rise of the mobile Internet most manufacturers also have a ‘Downloads’ application preloaded, but the downloadable content within this application isn’t preloaded but can be changed at any moment. If you manage to get your service in there, every user of a phone of that particular manufacturer, looks at your service as soon as they want to download something. One of the most successful examples of this is the App Store on all the iPhones. The other side is that the operator or manufacturer will demand a share of your advertising revenue, but it’ll be worth every penny.
Although according to Michael Arrington revenue models aren’t really web2.0, I’d advise you to be ahead of the pack and think of a way to monetize your service instead of waiting for demanding investors (like Mike himself, what a coincidence) to come along buying shares you could have sold ten times higher.
Written on August 26, 2008 – 5:41 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
It hasn’t appeared on the Technorati blog yet, but Michael Arrington broke the news: Technorati has acquired BlogCritics, a 6-year old blog network that draws around 1 million unique monthly visitors who watch 3 to 4 million pages.
In June, Technorati launched a blog advertising network called Technorati Media. CEO Richard Jalichandra wrote in the announcing blog post that “over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals.” Seems like he did just now, only in a slightly less orthodox way.
Where one would expect Technorati to focus on some sort of affiliate program, it just buys a network which gives them enough space and pageviews to place ads on. According to Crunchbase, BlogCritics has published 73,000 articles from 2,300 authors. Exactly, those bloggers are from the mid and long tail.
Jalichandra told Arrington that they will probably acquire more content sites soon. Well, truth be told, it’s a efficient way of building a solid blog ads network, that’s for sure. Although it does bring up an interesting question, is Technorati is a search company, or a media company? When choosing for the latter, who will guarantee me that Technorati search results aren’t biased?
Written on June 2, 2008 – 11:55 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Michael Arrington published an interesting article yesterday, concerned about the sheer amount of UGC being generated, ’spewing’ out onto a world where the signal to noise ratio is being lowered daily.
We have evermore tools allowing users to create, capture and clutter the Internet, all of which is forcing the attention span of consumers down to seconds.
Consumers are bombarded with messages and streams from feeds and sources which at some point along the way were picked up and are now spewing out of every conceivable crevice. All competing for attention, but the louder they become the easier they are to ignore.
But the essence of Mike’s desire is this: “we need open standards and businesses to emerge that help people link all their disconnected content together into a single online identity”, he goes on “to enhance real world social interactions”.
Aggregating all this spewing data solves the disjoint information problem sure, but this does nothing to curate all that data down to the most interesting nuggets.
I would argue that simply aggregating data into a single online identity is not going to enhance real world social interactions, but instead decrease our attention span even further.
Instead what will be successful are tools that curate all this noise in unique ways, ways that save us time, guessing what we need and predicting when we need it, then serving it on a plate like the morning paper.
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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. (
