Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on January 5, 2009 – 8:09 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When Jobs spread the word about his weight-loss this afternoon, Next Web editors Zee and Boris immediately started typing an article. Since they’re not sharing an office (Zee lives in London, Boris in Amsterdam) and both were utterly excited by the words from Mr. Apple himself, they didn’t see each other’s post. Thus sharp readers might have seen two posts about Jobs’ announcement on The Next Web (We deleted Boris’ post. At first he was devastated, but he’s feeling better now).
Anyhow, an hour or so later Boris called for my attention as he thought TechCrunch had made the same mistake. He noticed two posts about Jobs in his feedreader. One titled “Steve Responds to Rumors with a Steve-Note: I’m just Thin” and a second one called “Steve Jobs Explains His Weight Loss in Healthnote“. Did Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs pull the same trick as Zee and Boris?
Nah, it’s just Arrington force-feeding you some CrunchGear and MobileCrunch news. See the graphic Boris made to check out how TechCrunch’s 1.7 million RSS readers also get a load of John Biggs and the likes. Some of these articles also appear on the recently redesigned frontpage of TechCrunch.
This raises an interesting question: is it OK to show your readers posts from other blogs you own? Some readers are obviously not amused and speak of violating trust and all that. Others just ask the same question like me. I believe you can of course share news from your blog network, but doing without any notice or graphic hints is less stylish - if not confusing.
After all, you haven’t asked for Crunchgear posts, have you? Maybe you read Gizmodo for the latest gadget news because you like the tone of voice better. Who knows? Arrington doesn’t, that’s for sure. So there’s no motivation for him (except promotion) to shove it under your face.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 17, 2008 – 10:49 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last time I wrote (”Nimbuzz, coming to an iPhone near you“) about Nimbuzz they were adding 10.000 new members a day. It is not even 4 weeks later and now they are adding 20.000 new members a day.
It looks like Nimbuzz is on a roll!
Today they are announcing a major distribution deal with Indian based Spice Mobiles. India currently has 241 million Mobile Phone subscribers and Gartner expects those numbers to increase to 737 million by 2012.
India’s biggest Mobile Operator seems to be Bharti Airtel with 74 million subscribers. Vodafone is the fastest growing Mobile Operator with 23.5% of the market. They recently gained 1.2 million new subscribers in one month!
Spice Mobiles is a smaller but ambitious player which is owned by Idea Cellular and is estimated to have about 3.5 million subscribers right now.
Nimbuzz will soon come pre-installed on Spice Mobiles handset which are sold through their 25,000 retail outlets. The stores will also heavily market the Nimbuzz software with in-store Nimbuzz logos, links and service description on the Spice Mobiles website, and links to Nimbuzz on its WAP Portal. It is going to be pretty hard for Indian consumers to miss the Nimbuzz brand.
Complete Press Release:
NIMBUZZ SIGNS MAJOR DISTRIBUTION DEAL WITH SPICE MOBILES
Partnership brings pre-installed IM and Social Networking capabilities to Spice Mobiles users
(more…)
Written on December 12, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Everybody wants communication, why the hell do we need to pay for that?” That’s Antti Ohrling, founder of BLYK, talking at Youthwatching ‘09 - a marketing conference in Ghent, Belgium. He started a free mobile network for young people, funded by advertising. Mind you, it’s quite a success - BLYK is the fastest growing interactive media outlet for young people in the UK.
Yes, there are actually some British teens lucky enough to make their calls for free. You know how much money that would’ve saved me?
“Most advertising in media shares benefit with the audience. Take the skin creme sample in a magazine for example.”, Ohrling explains. “What’s different for mobile? Exactly, nothing. What would happen if somebody would offer free calls and text for advertising? An operator would become a media company.”
There’s no contract, no phone bill
BLYK focused on youngsters, as they’re a hard to reach but a profitable target group. Ohrling: “If you talk with them and use language they understand, then you have to change to get involved.”
One of the brands British kids most distrusted were operators, so BLYK had to develop a different way to talk to them. Here’s what Ohrling came up with it: there’s no contract, no phone bill. But you do have to get invited. (so that BLYK can get a balanced target audience).
When invited, people had to complete personal profile online so that BLYK can target the advertising better. 95% of the 200,000 people did so.
Does it work?
“If there’s a balance between value for advertisers and customers, BLYK is a success”. Well, it seems like that’s the case. The 2000 campaigns had a 25% average response rate. Normally this rate for mobile advertising is four percent. BLYK has 200 brands on board, of which 66 percent did repeated business.
The obviously proud BLYK founder mentions some success stories. Like a Will Ferrel trailer, 44 percent of the users requested to see it. A Penguin book, Slam by Nick Horby, was also a blast on BLYK. 67 percent wanted to hear a Skins star reading the first chapter out loud. Lucozade supplied users with free drink vouchers. 35 percent was redeemed.
Closing in on YouTube and Facebook
BLYK has the highest net advocacy score among mobile networks in the UK and is closing in on YouTube and Facebook. Why? Ohrling: “In mobile marketing, interaction is key. The power of the question is much higher than the power of the answer. Make people think, and they engage with you. If they engage, you’re in the game. We’re in the game”.
British youngsters become slaves to advertising to avoid paying phone bills. Why wouldn’t they? What are the negative consequences for them? Other than clicking ads away.., none.
Written on November 5, 2008 – 2:49 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s a mobile start-up that has been underestimating its target audience for a while. Flirtomatic, the UK’s leading mobile and online flirting service, has sent out a press release filled with words of surprise. It basically says: “hey, these customers actually are pretty smart”.
Flirtomatic has conducted a survey to gain some insight on the mobile usage of its users. 5,800 responded, 87% of them completed the ten questions. Here are some of the results that get CEO Mark Curtis excited, copy/pasted from the press release:
- 56% of respondents said that they use bookmarking in order to return to Flirtomatic, a figure much higher than initially expected.
- When asked ‘which best describes your internet connection at home?’ a whopping 84% of users stated they usually use their phone to connect to the Web.
- 38% of users have already invited their friends to join Flirtomatic and a further 57% are considering it
Flirtomatic passed the one million users mark in September. Now that we know a lot of those folks are pretty smart, the future for the London start-up looks brighter than ever.
Written on October 17, 2008 – 11:38 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Operator portals were doomed to disappear when the walled gardens opened up about two years ago, but after the rise of the smartphone and introduction of unlimited data packages they are doing better than ever. Still, most of the mobile internet use takes place within the borders of these portals. The predicted growth of off portal inventory goes much slower than predicted.
Smart mobile start-ups
However, it must be noted that a couple of smart mobile startups did a great job filling up this new space. Mobile-only communities like Itsmy.com, myGamma, and Flirtomatic are growing rapidly these days. Their big advantage is the painful absence of the bigger brands on mobile Internet, which results in most of the off portal advertising budget ending up in their pockets.
No mobile versions
On the other hand, this is exactly what’s withholding mobile media buyers to spend more budget off portal. Most established websites do simply not offer a mobile version of their successful online product. This is why media buyers who represent big consumer brands don’t want to spend budget off portal. Brands attract brands. Simple as that.
Be ahead of the pack
So why are these online brands still not available on the mobile Internet? I guess they’re simply waiting when the time is right, but they should be ahead of the pack because they are the main drivers behind the availability of premium off portal inventory. Their motivation might be that it’s still hard to drive traffic to a mobile site. While using their phone, people are often too lazy to enter a URL.
So all the traffic derives from really motivated people that are dedicated to find a certain mobile site and Google Mobile (which seldom directs you to a mobile site). Well, what about directing people to your mobile site from your online site? Offering an on-the-go version of your brand? Enhancing your site with an extra service because you like your users so much and want to offer them your content whenever they want to?
Best place to start? What about right here? That picture is how our mobile presence looks like at the moment, as the brand new mobile editor this is definitely the first challenge ahead of me. We’re going mobile! Keep you posted.
Written on October 15, 2008 – 12:05 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Today is Blog Action Day. Today, many blogs all over the world will bring news, ideas and opinions to the world regarding one subject: poverty. Being a mobile marketeer, it seems like a weird idea to write about poverty since mobile phones must be the last thing on the minds of people struggling to stay alive, right?
You couldn’t have been more wrong. The most recent Mobile Metrics report by AdMob - AdWords for mobile - shows that AdMob serves about 35% of all their impressions in underdeveloped countries. Not impressed? Fishermen in India use their mobile to check the day rates of different sorts of fish to determine what fish they should aim for. In South Africa, people have completely skipped the era of broadband and use the internet for the first time on their handsets. Although food en fresh water aren’t, mobile is a true global phenomenon. So, how can we use mobile phones to decrease poverty? I have an idea.
Recently I became a Child Sponsor at World Vision, a charity organization that improves children’s lifes all over the world. Looking at the picture of my newly sponsored child, Scola Jalale (in Malawi that’s a real common name), a mobile idea popped up.
A couple of months ago I wrote an article about mobile charity payments. In this article I argue that since the mobile payment system is already in use in Africa, we could use it to send money directly to African people we care about. And now I’m Scola’s sponsor I had to think of it again. Scola is eight years old and currently at school, how fantastic would it be if we could text each other? This project would seemlessly fit in her school program and the money I would send her would benefit her and her community. The system should be pretty easy to set up, since the mobile payment system has already proven to be a success in Kenia. The costs of the text messages could be billed to the sponsor through a reversed billing system, which is also used in tv show votes. By selecting a certain number the sponsor can chose to send a message with either 0.50, 1, 1.50 or 2 dollars/euros/pounds. And given that World Vision probably wants to stay in control of the process, they could facilitate the cash points and take a share of the gift to invest in the whole community. If I were fifty and had a couple of millions in the bank, I’d start developing tomorrow.
Written on October 14, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
I was glad to be invited to Finland recently, where mobile giant Nokia gave some hints about “the way we live next”. They introduced their visions for 2015 and allowed to test some upcoming cool services, fresh from the labs.
An idea Nokia researchers are exited about is what they call “sensing and aggregating data” to have “a world of highly tailored and proactive information”.
Bob Iannucci, Head of Nokia Research Center predicts that in about seven years time the world is full of sensors. For each mobile phone, there’ll be ten wireless connected private sensors - one in your car, one in your clothes, one in your house etc - all “bridged” with your mobile phone. The sensors cost almost nothing, because the technology already exists.
What are the consequences?
Iannucci explains that Nokia is able to take your location data and aggregate it with your diary, your calendar and your user history, since your phone learns from your behavior.
Imagine sitting in a meeting, having subscribed to a traffic feed. Your phone recognizes that the route you are about to take is congested and “says” to you: “I see that you got to be on Mark’s birthday at 15:00. But the route that you usually take is congested, so you better leave early! And how would you like me to plan another route?”
Disease control
Or another example: disease control. Iannucci says that the granularity of US disease control system, for example, is so poor, that it is even hard to say how many people are infected in particular county. So why can’t our phones be able to recognize our health conditions or body temperature?
Weather sensors
Our Nokias could also be our personal “weather sensors”. Iannucci talks about thousands of existing weather sensors located in places like mountain tops and airports, where no one really lives. How about using our phones and their wireless data delivery capabilities to sense weather and with the help of hundreds of millions of weather sensors like that provide climate data, with maximum possible accuracy.
Cool new services of Nokia
Here’s an overview of some of the new services Nokia is “baking”:
- Indoor Positioning. Provides a positioning and location-based service inside a building. Users can add new buildings and can contribute measurement data and context information. Indoor maps are enhanced by user-created Point-of-Interests. The indoor positioning platform respects privacy. There’s a demo project going on in Helsingi Kamppi Center.
- Local Interaction takes social-networking and location-based services indoors: find your friends based on indoor positioning, browse nearby places on indoor maps, add media and comments to indoor places. All of this is easy to access on your web-enabled phone.
- Point & Find enables people on the move to access information and services on the Internet, simply by pointing a camera phone at real-world objects. In the first beta version of Point & Find to be released in the near future in US and UK, users can instantly watch the film trailer, read the review, or find the closest cinema to buy tickets, simply by pointing a camera phone at a poster for a new movie.
- The Morph concept device, launched alongside The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre in United Kingdom. The nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.
The full list of Nokia service demos is here.
Written on September 27, 2008 – 5:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quite a late report about who won the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition last night at Picnic, but anybody who has ever attended a web conference knows the valid reason for this. Vodafone Netherlands organized the Mobile Clicks competition to support Dutch mobile start-ups with €100k (and to get some good PR).
The last couple of months, 20 start-ups presented their ideas for a jury with acclaimed Dutch and Belgian mobile experts like Rudy de Waele and Yuri van Geest. I witnessed it all from close distance, as my friends Edial Dekker and Laura van der Vlies participated with MapTheGap. They want to create a tool that helps creative folks to easily store ideas - without them losing the context of time and place. It’s just an idea right now, development will probably start soon.
These were the other five nominees:
- Nulaz: interactive location based service that shows where your friends and interesting places (like restaurants and museums are).
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TipSpot: a social city guide with tips of friends and locals. Already active in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and the Hague.
- Mi-i: offers an extra TV experience by providing context-relevant social games.
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Mobypicture: easy sharing of pictures on Flickr and co. Is hugely popular in the Dutch Twitter scene.
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Exphera: world-wide mobile broad band Internet access for a fixed price.
Yesterday was the day of the climax. The six finalists kicked off in the morning with presentations and the final judgment of the jury led to the show at 6pm. And a show it was. Vodafone Netherlands CEO Guy Laurence really knows how to pump up a crowd. He announced that the prize was split in three: 60k, 30k, and 10k. The winners are…. Nulaz (60k), TipSpot (30k), and MapTheGap (10k)! They were all ecstatic.
The jury picked Nulaz because of its great potential. With growth of 35,000 users in three months (from 25,000 to 60,000), this isn’t hard to understand. That the start-up also has corporate clients, paying customers, and a broad range of services also helped.
Despite these advantages, Nulaz does face ferocious competition, especially from operators who aren’t particularly fond of the service. These companies would rather offer a location based service themselves, especially now that they’re looking for alternative revenue sources. Therefore it’s actually quite ironic that Nulaz won this prize (only one member of the jury represented Vodafone), as there are no strings attached. But hey, if Vodafone acquires the service in a few months, they’ll have their investment back.
By the way, we have 75 invites for people interested in using Tipspot as a social guide in Holland’s largest cities. Get them here.
Written on September 26, 2008 – 4:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Flirtomatic, the UK’s leading mobile social networking service announced that they’ve welcomed the millionth user this week. Not surprisingly, since the service cuts to the chase: it’s just about flirting. Most of those flirting users are British and more than half of them seduce folks via the mobile phone. Flirtomatic has just started to lure Germans into their flirting heaven.
The growth of Flirtomatic is rather spectacular. It had 225,000 registered users in February 2007, which means an almost 350% growth within an 18 month period. What’s even more interesting, is Flirtomatic’s impressive revenue growth. According to a press release, it has “skyrocketed” by 475%.
Make money with mobile
That’s fascinating, as at all the mobile conferences I’ve been, people have been complaining about a lack of revenue through mobile advertising et al. Maybe Flirtomatic is exaggerating and their revenue increased from 1 euro to nearly 500 euros. But I figured it would be worth it anyhow to ask Flirtomatic CEO Mark Curtis to share his thoughts on generating revenue via mobile sites.
Curtis: “Generating revenue on the mobile web is basically about either advertising or user payments. You can forget data revenue share with operators, especially with the - slowly growing - move to flat rate.”
Mobile advertising
Advertising? At MoMo Amsterdam, I heard Yme Bosma from Holland’s largest social networking service Hyves say that they would only think of advertising when they have millions of users. So how about that?
Curtis: “Advertising is bumpy but growing. It’s rather difficult to separate out the effect of the credit crunch on advertiser confidence from the inevitably inconsistent demand of a nascent marketplace. In other words, the revenue stream is good and getting better but is damn hard to predict.”
User revenues
So user revenues might be a more secure option? Curtis: “Luckily user revenues are easier to predict once you have some runway behind you, and are continuing to lift. It’s easy to see why: a long time ago operators put in place micro billing through handsets and users became accustomed to it through the first mobile content boom. There remains however a lot of suspicion following the dodgy subscription packages that many consumers were caught out by.” (more…)
Written on September 16, 2008 – 10:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s your blogger live reporting from Web 2.0 Expo, New York City - ready to keep you up to date about the latest start-ups and tech news. It’s gonna be an interesting few days, with big shots like Adriana Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, Jay Adelson, and Clay Shirky sharing their views on the next web.
After spending a few hours in the awfully cold and boring Javits center, I’ve already met some interesting start-ups. Like Berlin-based 3D chat service Smeet. Founder Sebastian Funke pitched the service to me this morning. At first I was skeptical, I’ve seen so many 3D, avatar-crazy, Flash 9-based chatting services that they doesn’t manage to tickle my fancy anymore. Yet when Funke mentioned that Smeet is completely web-based and embeddable at different sites, I realized this one could actually be interesting.
Call me on my mobile
Users on Smeet can create their own multi mesh avatar (meaning your character is wearing a shirt AND jacket, they’re the only browser-based service offering that) and join a room for a good discussion or a useless chat with other users. They’re plenty of them, although being able to speak German is quite essential (Smeet has 200,000 users in its home country). Next to text-based chatting, users can also give a ring to their mobile phone - so that they can talk with users who are standing close to them in the virtual room.
There’s where the business model comes in, as the German service makes some money out of the calls users make. Another source of income is the virtual goods shop. Habbo Hotel proved this can be a solid way of making money.
Embed a room in your site
The development team of Smeet is now working on embeddable rooms, which Funke hopes to release next week in alpha mode. This could be really exciting, as you can drag your avatar to every Smeet-supported site and start a riot. You could even watch a YouTube movie together (see screenshot).
Funke presented an impressive list part of partners that will include rooms on their site. It consisted of major media companies like RTL, EMI, Universal, and Big Brother. He told me Smeet is looking for similar partners outside Germany, namely in the States and the larger European countries.
So in the end, just another chatting service turns out to be a company with a good userbase and healthy ambitions that will probably become reality one day.
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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. (
