Written on 16th June 2009
5 COMMENTS Keith, Network Consultant, Social Media Fanatic
Facebook vanity URLs have been around for just over 72 hours but we are already seeing a major brand capitalize on their Facebook URL for an advertising campaign. Volkswagen (VW) has released a series of TV ads that in addition to highlighting their vehicles points viewers to facebook.com/vw. This is the very first instance that we are aware of a marketing strategy that utilizes the a brand’s Facebook page instead of the companies main website, VW.com.
(We would embed the video but Facebook doesn’t like sharing outside of their walled garden, click the screencap below to view the video within Facebook.)
The social network integration goes a step further with a “Meet the Volkswagens” Facebook app
Written on 15th April 2009
27 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google’s first attempts at a social network with Orkut have not proved fruitful, apart from in Brazil of course. Other more standard social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have seen great success with large rounds of investment and major acquisitions.
Little did we know however that whilst we thought Google had made a conscious decision to take steps away from the “social networking” arena, they were building one right under our noses and have the capabilities to grow larger and more useful than any competitor.
Facebook: Social Network –>Apps.
Google: Apps–>Social Network
Facebook’s attempts at developing an OS on the back of its social network has shown impressive uptake amongst developers but left many users aggravated because of mostly useless application notifications. Google have built best of breed web applications and have gradually introduced social interactions within them; Gmail with Gtalk, Maps with Latitude, Google Reader with sharing and commenting features, iGoogle with tab sharing.All these sites and others are all neatly connected via a Google Bar (that need better customization options) stretched across the top of all your Google apps.
Additionally, with Google’s App Engine increasingly gaining popularity, we should continue to see impressive applications launch outweighing Facebook’s in usership and developer control. Google are creating a platform with apps far superior to the likes of those on Facebook with OpenSocial and App Engine as its backbone.
The Google Profile and Vanity URL’s.
The Google profile has, albeit slowly, seen small progressive developments in recent months.
Introduced just over a year ago, Google introduced them as:
Written on 15th April 2009
0 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Swedish/German startup SoundCloud is a service dedicated to helping music professionals share music online.
We covered the company whilst in private beta in June of last year, the site has since generated a fair bit of buzz and with almost 100,000 registered users it looks like they’ve got something going for them. Today comes news of a €2.3 million round of investment courtesy of Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and according to TechCrunch, the deal also involves Stefan Tirtey of Doughty Hanson joining the company’s board of directors.
At it’s core, the site is a social network of Music professionals, from musicians to producers right through to label executives. The backbone of the service however is it’s music sharing capabilities, providing a slick and simple way to share audio amongst members and keep track of who has listened to what.
Amongst many useful features, users with access rights can leave comments attached to specific parts of a song. Songs and playlists can also be made public and embedded in websites as you can see below.
Every visitor to The Next Web Conference has a profile on our special event social network. One part of their profile is a “I’m providing” and ‘I’m looking for” list of items they can check or uncheck.
Based on those tags we actively match people during the conference and set up meetings. This tool is one of the reasons that so many deals are done and the why conference is known for its great networking.
We took a good look at the tags this morning and can spot a few interesting trends:
31% of all attendees are looking for “partnerships”
The demand for Mobile Web & app development is twice as high as the supply. Opportunities there!
With Web development it is the other way around with more supply than demand.
iPhone development is a rising star. There is three times as much demand as supply for that.
No one seems to be interested in “Blogging skills” but we do have over 12% offering just that. Oops.
No economic downturn in our sector apparently with 50 people offering “Full time jobs” and only 25 people looking for one.
Unfortunately there is a problem with “Free Beer”: A lot of people (38%) are looking for “free beer” but only 22% is offering it. Oh well…
Sign-in to the network here if you haven’t done that already and make sure you enter a few tags yourself: http://thenextweb.confnetwork.com/
Flirtomatic is a ridiculously popular mobile social network from the UK. That makes sense, as it’s all about sex. Seduce your desired guy or gal via the mobile phone. Currently, 1.3 million folks are concerned with this act of love.
The growth of Flirtomatic is rather spectacular. It had 225,000 registered users in February 2007. What’s even more interesting, is Flirtomatic’s impressive revenue growth. According to a press release in September, it has “skyrocketed” by 475%.
Taking that in account, it’s actually interesting to hear that the service will launch a mobile beta in the U.S. of A. CEO Mark Curtis commented in a press release: “It’s a difficult time in the market, but we’re optimistic that we can enter the US successfully. It will not be easy but if we can replicate some of the success we’ve had in the UK and Germany, generating revenues within six months, we will have taken a major step towards achieving our goals.”
I think the success of Flirtomatic tells us a lot about the future of mobile: it’s gonna be exciting. Sex always leads the way, so Facebook and national networks will follow. I for one, do most of my social networking via iPhone apps.
Eleven months after Aaron Peters and Arne Dibbits pushed Bemba in the open beta phase, the social bookmarking service heads to the feared deadpool. 15 minutes ago, Peters used a “Tweet bomb” to share the bad news with his 278 followers:
It’s sad to see Bemba leave the social bookmarking stage. The two kind guys aimed for people who don’t why complicated services, they just want to get the job done. After users have installed the Bemba plugin — there’s no bookmarklet — they can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with just two clicks.
Apparently, this didn’t appeal to enough people for Bemba to survive these harsh economic times. I wish the Dutch entrepreneurs all the best with their future endeavors.
Let me conclude with a quote by Benjamin Franklin:
‘I haven’t failed, I have had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.’
Here’s one to get you started and inspired this morning. In which Twitter stage are you? Recognition is the first step to improvement, so maybe realizing that you’re in “Dumping” helps you getting to no. 5.
One tip to get you started: send @replies which aren’t too interesting for other people via a DM.
Some people I know are already there and it’s just awesome to follow them. They find great stuff, have funny conversations, and thus enrich my Twitter experience. Check out Pixites for an example. Who’s your favorite Twitter user?
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!
Youthwatching ‘09 is a Belgian conference about youth culture. Luckily, they realize that such a conference is a pure fake when they’re no youngsters around. Thus they’ve invited young lads and girls to the give a short presentation about their projects and dreams.
Turns out that some guys have really noble goals in mind. Toon and Bert hate the taboo on masturbating girls. To combat this general perception, they’ve started an online initiative called WeMasturbate. With pages on MySpace and Netlog plus stickers, t-shirts, and buttons in the off line world they gain attention for their cause:
Boys masturbate and can talk and show off about it. But when it comes to girls and masturbation, ieeeuw.
The guys believe in positive discrimination, so only girls are allowed to befriend them. So far, 14332 Netlog chicks have joined their cause. Netlog founder Lorenz Bogaert also gave a presentation during Youthwatching and he advised Toon and Bert to expand their business to Turkey, where in a recent research 42 percent of the youngsters acknowledged they had stripped in front of a webcam.
I felt pretty dull when I had to give my talk about problogging…
Newly launched Baveo is a great site for expecting parents to announce the arrival of the newest generation to the web.
Baveo allows users to post photos, videos, and text updates to a blog devoted entirely to the newest members of the family. The site is well designed for parents and family on the go. Parents can post directly to their Baveo blog via their site or their phones, and friends and family can stay updated via email or text messages.
Baveo has a number of other niceties parents will love. For one, the site is simple. Both your grandparents in Florida and aunt in Tuscaloosa can use it. There’s a countdown to the baby’s due date, and people can even give directly to baby registries from the site.
I recently had the chance to chat with Ari Greenberg, Baveo’s CEO and founder. Ari helped break down where the idea for Baveo came from, how the team came to be, what they’re up to, and a few other thoughts about being an early entrepreneur.
A life changing experience?
After witnessing a childhood friend and his wife blog about the birth of their first child, Ari’s idea for Baveo was born. Ari saw the chance to make a wonderful and important experience even better. Expecting parents deserved a better and more integrated blogging experience.
Previously at Magnify.net, Ari spent his free time exploring the project further. He had always known he wanted to start his company, but he lacked an idea worth pursuing.
Everyone works for equity
Baveo quickly became that idea, and when he realized it, Ari wasted no time building a team of three. Everyone works for equity, and Ari wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s how he knew the team believed in the idea and wanted to see it succeed. It also ensured the team would be honest with him and tell him when things weren’t going right. Both are equally important.
Mom and dad bloggers
The site is currently invite-only so the team is working towards building out new features and publicizing the site. There’s a large community of mom and dad bloggers out there for them to tap into, and they’re exploring ways for users to better capture and share baby memories.
No matter what they think now, though, the team is focused on letting their users decide where Baveo goes next. “Everything needs to be about the user,” Ari says, “Users will tell you what they want if you listen.”
For all of you expecting parents out there, sign up for a Baveo invite now. Let your friends know what’s going on with your little cherub and let Baveo know what you think of their service. They’re listening.
Written on 16th June 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Facebook vanity URLs have been around for just over 72 hours but we are already seeing a major brand capitalize on their Facebook URL for an advertising campaign. Volkswagen (VW) has released a series of TV ads that in addition to highlighting their vehicles points viewers to facebook.com/vw. This is the very first instance that we are aware of a marketing strategy that utilizes the a brand’s Facebook page instead of the companies main website, VW.com.
Written on 15th April 2009
Google’s first attempts at a social network with 
Swedish/German startup 
Written on 15th April 2009
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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 off, the future of the Web. (More info 
