Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 5th September 2008
2 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura’s blog often features in stories all over the blogosphere (read about their secret here), but now their product, the visual search engine, will be the talk of the day. CEO Yakov Sadchikov has just mailed me that his company has received several million dollars in bridge funding from leading European early-stage venture capital investor Mangrove Capital Partners as a part of new financing round.
The funding will help to scale the site search platform and grow monthly audience of Quintura Site Search from its current 8 million to 50 million in 2009. That’s quite an ambition, but the search engine is doing a good job already. Quintura offers its services to men’s magazine Maxim as well as tech blog ReadWriteWeb (talking about a diverse group of customers). But further growth is needed anyhow. In order to achieve this, Russian-based Quintura has hired Dennis Szerszen as US-based Chief Marketing Officer.
When I interviewed Sadchikov a while ago, he told me he aims for his product to be the “iPhone of search“. The search results already look quite good, but it isn’t such a visual spectacle as the famous shiny object yet. Sadchikov will need more money for that, that’s why he will use Mangrove’s capital for bringing in new venture capital investors as well.
Written on 4th September 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
On August 21 Twitter announced it would turn up the heat on spam. They introduced some measures to keep spammers from abusing the system including a new rule that forbid people from following more than 2000 people. Unsurprisingly spammer did not give up on twitter and are now finding new ways to game the system.
On the right here is a screenshot of my Inbox with Twitter notifications. As you can see these are clearly computer generated usernames.
Twitters new anti spam measures seem effective up to a certain point. Yes, the accounts are now suspended and show a message explaining that this might be a fake account: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity”. Unfortunately the current fix only becomes effective after the damage is done:
It seems the sign-up process is currently too easy to automate and will keep attracting spammers looking for an easy way to reach an audience. The fight against spam will be an ongoing battle for Twitter. But you can help too! If you see a clear Twitter spammer just Tweet the following:
@spam @spammername
That will alert Twitter and will give them a chance to suspend the account before too much damage is done.
Written on 26th August 2008
2 COMMENTS
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 25th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yandex has changed its Roman character logo into one depicting the company name in Cyrillic. According to Yakov from Quintura, this means Yandex has become a househould name in Russia. The new logo, by design consultancy Art. Lebedev Studio must stimulate the rise of Yandex’s brand, which is on its way to becoming one of Russia’s best-known brands.
Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh
“Our technology is better suited for the Russian market,” Volozh told The Sunday Times. “We have brilliant mathematicians and programmers. We are very strong on data analysis and have developed better technology, which is cutting-edge in Russia. We are constantly inventing new programs to stay ahead.”
So there’s no world-domination tour coming up for Yandex. But why would they? Operating in one of the world’s most exciting Internet markets, the engine is attracting 8 million people per day to its site and holds a share of 55 percent. That’s the bases of their success story: the victory over Google, which only holds 21 percent of the Russian search market. Yes, Yandex is booming. CEO Arkady Volozh knows this, as he told The Times in an interesting interview that “in two years since Google opened an office in Russia we haven’t lost a single specialist to our competitors because Yandex is one of the best companies to work for in Russia.”
The Sunday Times article by Mark Franchetti proves an interesting insight in the career of Volozh, a mathematician who was 24 years old when he first saw a personal computer. Touchy subjects like goverment-supported oligarchs aren’t discussed though. Volozh only says he’s not considering a sale.
Written on 16th August 2008
13 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Ernst-Jan has already written a piece about how useful the Quintura corporate blog is for keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in Eastern Europe and Russia. Now Yakov brings us this gem: apparently Czech search engine Seznam is talking to potential buyers about selling for a price exceeding $1 billion. Yes, that’s billion with a ‘b’ as in ‘big money’.
Google is cited as a potential acquirer, along with private equity firms Warburg Pincus, owner of Czech portal Centrum, and Macquarie Capital Alliance Group, owner of Czech yellow pages publisher Mediatel.
Seznam had 62% share of the Czech search market vs. Google’s 29% share. The site reported 4.4 million unique users in May 2008, and is estimating bringing in revenues of approx. $90 million this year, up 40% from 2007. The company was previously valued at $300 million after two private equity firms bought out Lycos Europe’s 30% stake for $91 million. The majority of shares is still in the hands of founder Ivo Lukačovič.
There seems to be a huge consolidation wave in the Czech internet landscape (see Yakov’s post for more on that), but if this deal goes through, it would make it one of the largest in the history of the Eastern European web scene alltogether.
Written on 14th August 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Our Finnish Webtipr is a search engine anarchist. He denies submission to Google. Sure, he uses it a lot, and probably couldn’t live without it, but he’s critical. Timo Paloheimo basically has three problems with the search giant. He was so kind to mail them to me:
- Google has 70% market share in the US, worldwide even more. (in Finland their market share is said to be 95%).
- Google has no transparency, they do not reveal how their search engine ranks content. There are numerous opinions that Google does indeed favor their own content.
- Google’s reason for existence is to make money, which is done by delivering the best possible results for them, not the best for the user. A monopoly can do that.
You’ve probably heard these complaints before, maybe you discuss them with friends once in a while. But for Timo, it didn’t end with just complaining. He has used Google Custom Search to create a version of Google that doesn’t search within Google-owned services. So no Knol, YouTube, or Blogger. Google Minus Google offers you trustworthy results.
Media company or search engine?
Paloheimo found inspiration for his project in a New York Times article titled “Is Google a Media Company?“. The article raised questions like whether Google would give Knol pages a higher ranking than, say, a Mahalo or About.com page.
Paloheimo doubts whether Google offers the best pages, as it’s the party that offers the results, but also makes money from them. As an example, he mailed me two screenshots of a search for “analytics”. The Google search shows links to the Google Analytics tool and the blog, Google Minus Google offers links to Wikipedia pages and companies who specialize in analytics.
The best results
“Don’t get me wrong”, says Paloheimo – who hopes Google consider his idea to be a parody -, “I’ve been a Google fan for years and I use it every day perhaps a few hundred times. I love the search engine, it has delivered the best results. I want it to stay that way.”
Written on 7th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Google Adsense has announced some key enhancements, based on the technologies of the in March acquired Doubleclick. These improvements will offer a “better experience for users” (meaning less annoying and less privacy) and “better value for advertisers” (meaning more statistics and control):
These steps will be introduced in the coming months:
- Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
- Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
- Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
- View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.
To be able to provide these new statistics, Google needs to follow your footprints through the Google Network. So Google will embed a cookie that monitors how many times you’ve seen an ad and whether you clicked on it. If this doesn’t sound like a good idea to you, there’s the possibility to opt out.
How about the not-so savvy users?
As a savvy user, you’ll be aware of this. But the majority of people browsing around the Google network still think there only is an analog version of cookies (the ones you’ll find in a jar). So how will they be able to know Google is tracking most of their online activity?
Written on 29th June 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In March I covered AndUnite, a service that matches your search keywords with those from other people – to help you find folks with similar interests. Although this idea may sound kind of awkward, I felt – and still feel – that Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande and Christian Schmidkonz had developed a useful search plugin. You don’t need to tag, bookmark, or anything in that direction, AndUnite just works in the background, slowly but steadily connecting you to interesting people. Very 3.0. Moreover, it’s possible to sign up anonymously – so they’re hardly any privacy issues involved. But now, these two German gentlemen have taken it a step too far for me.
They’ve developed a Facebook application that allows you to share your searches. This was, apparently, a “major request by many users’. But why? Why would you want to share these – mostly boring or private – keywords on your Facebook profile. That’s what I want to figure out with you. Please tell me why you would, or wouldn’t, want to install this app.
Written on 11th June 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swedish start-up Twingly sent out an email yesterday to its 3000 private beta testers that their blog search engine goes live on Thursday. This is not just an engine in the line of Google Blogsearch or Technorati, since it offers spam-free results. Every blogger can ping the service, but the people behind Twingly only select the high-quality ones. The engine also has a 3.0 touch to it, as users can ‘like’ posts – which will affect the search results positively.
It doesn’t stop here though, as CEO Martin Källström and his team want to use their search engine as the basis for developing “kick-ass products”. A fine example is the Twingly Blogstream, a service that aimes to connect mainstream media with bloggers. This objective is close to my heart, as I believe that the majority of media consumers miss out on all the blog fun.
Connecting mainstream and blogs
Right now, Twingly offers a related blogposts widget to fourteen newspapers from all over Europe and one from South-Africa. On top of that, a bunch of Swedish magazines use the services of Twingly. So when a reader of these publications reads an article about the weak dollar, Twingly also suggests some posts from the blogosphere covering the same topic. This is a subtle and valuable way of introducing people to that oh so special world of blogs as the content is really relevant to them.
From a search engine to fun apps
To prove that the blogosphere really is a special world, Twingly has also developed a fun product: the Twingly Screensaver. This program shows a fancy visual representation of the state of the blogosphere, which looks like this:
First we conquer Europe
I think products like this spectacular screensaver are developed to let Twingly go viral. I’m pretty sure the guys from Twingly won’t deny this, as they tend not to hide their ambitions. Their eventual goal is “nothing short of world dominance”. In order to reach that, Twingly is currently focusing its efforts on European blogs. Smart move, as it will be hard enough to get engines like Blogsearch and Technorati out of people’s minds. When they’ve charmed Europe with their fun apps, spam free results, and a clear promise that they’re specifically focusing on this continent, the Swedes will probably head for the United States. This tactic might pay off, as Twingly really creates an unique blog experience.
Written on 7th June 2008
13 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We’ve recently reported that the Russian search market is dominated by native search engines like Yandex. This leading service was recently valuated at $5 billion and is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq this autumn. That must have scared Google, as they’ve launched an outdoor campaign called “Moscow 2.0″ – “Know more on Google.ru“.
According to industry analysts, Google has invested $0.5 million in this traditional way of advertising – which comes down to $250,000 per month. That has bought them 550,000 ad places all over Moscow – reports Quintura -, which Google has covered with 24 billboards, 58 benches and 450,000 thousand stickers. Where’s the 2.0 part, you might wonder. Well, Russian can embed their city snap shots and videos in Google Maps. How does that feel, Yandex? Already frightened?
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