Getting actual contact from web sites has always been a troublesome area for three important reasons – people hate filling in forms, people are wary of getting a lot of marketing junk when they fill in forms, and those forms can’t always integrate easily with a customer / lead management database.
These are three problem areas that Leadjini plans to solve with one solution. Firstly, it allows you to set up and embed custom enquiry forms onto your web site easily. Secondly, it allows those filling in the forms to remain anonymous from the company they are contacting (using leadjini as the intermediary). Thirdly, it allows clever management of contacts through a web-based database and contact management system.
The service is currently in beta, but is fully functional, and there are a range of different service levels at different monthly costs, including a single-widget free account. I set up an account in 30 seconds, created a widget and added it to a blog in less than five minutes, and was able to see the results of completing the form there instantly, with an email straight to my inbox, and in my online lead manager.
The lead manager is relatively simple at present, as no sorting, exporting or filtering are currently in place. Some enhanced form options might be desirable, but the ‘anonymous enquiry’ option may certainly serve to increase response rates for certain types of enquiries. The issue of form spam is not currently addressed with any captcha or other ‘human-only’ devices, and this may be a stumbling block for some.
However, Leadjini certainly works well, and checked out perfectly in three separate browser tests. It is a fast, easy and painless way to gather contact details reliably from a web page, and then have them stored in an easy to access and simple to update online database. More sophistication might be required of the lead manager, but I have to assume that is likely to be catered for in further releases, and in paid options.
At The Next Web Blog we love to report on what the future of the web looks like. And if we get a chance we love to help shape it ourselves. Next to a blog (and a conference!) we also have an active Incubator with shares in several projects and companies.
One of those projects is TwitterCounter. We launched TwitterCounter in June 2008 after we found out that more and more people were ignoring our RSS feed because they were getting our new post notifications via Twitter. If that is happening, we need a Feedburner for Twitter, is what we thought.
And so we built it and launched it, all within 48 hours.
Since then we have grown fast and we are now generating more than 3 million TwitterCounters per day, we generate 30.000 pageviews a day on TwitterCounter.com and sell the Featured spot on the front page for $500 a week.
Yes, five hundred a week and we are sold out until April!
We are constantly working on new features ands improvements for TwitterCounter with the 2.5 developers we have. I’m only half a developer and am lucky to be able to rely on Arjen and Maurits to do most of the heavy work.
The last two weeks we have been working day and night to launch a new and exciting feature which we call TwitterRemote.
TwitterRemote is a small widget you can embed on your site, blog or social profile which displays which Twitter users recently visited your blog. The catch: those Twitter users do have to sign into TwitterRemote first. For now we actually have to ask people for their username + password. As soon as Twitter launched OAuth we will skip that step completely.
After twitter users sign in their profile is displayed on every TwitterRemote enabled website they visit after that. The advantage for site owners is that they see who visits their site and they even have an opportunity to contact these people. Twitter users get a change to improve their visibility for site owners and other visitors. It is kinda like MyBlogLog, or FaceBook connect, but for Twitter!
We tested the service with 200 people for the last 2 days and are now ready to get more testers involved. As always, we highly appreciate any feedback!
The last few weeks, the Next Web Blog is all about crowd-sourcing. I’m not sure why, maybe we’re just inspired by the US elections. We started with launching a GooseGrade competition (correct our spelling and grammar and have the chance of winning a Flip Video), now we’ve integrated a rating feature.
In the comments section you can let us know what you think of a certain post (see picture right). From your ratings, we hope to learn what kind of posts you guys like and which can be considered “popular”.
Don’t write for your audience, write about stuff that you find both interesting and are good at. Rockstars don’t care about their audience, they care about their music.
We agree with him.., sort of. We will always bring (European) tech news which is a bit on the edge, but still, we’d love to hear what kind of topics deserve more attention.
Khris Loux from JS-Kit supported us with his awesome ratings widget. He’s a great friend (there’s your disclosure) and it’s a pleasure to use his service for improving our blog.
The crazy rush to free traffic for bloggers promised by the Blogrush network had came to an end without leaving the beta stage, unfortunately. The founder, John Reese, has closed the doors of the one year (or so) old company.
As he stated on the website’s frontpage “the service spread like wildfire all over the Web”. I don’t know if the bad economy or something else made them close the doors but Blogrush wasn’t monetized at all, not even with advertising. How did they survive? By losing a small fortune, the founder said. Concentrating on acquiring users and worrying about monetizing later? Well, I guess that was the mantra of almost every Web 2.0 startup which in this economy meltdown doesn’t cut it anymore.
The blogs from the network were scrutinized before getting accepted in the network (disclosure: my personal blog was rejected sometime ago) so they wanted to ensure the highest quality of it. It seems they have made some mistakes (not accepting my personal blog was one :)…ok,ok, I am joking) starting from selecting blogs, continuing with security issues and lower clickthrough rates, not to mention abusive users who tried to game the system (I don’t think there is a system which users won’t try to game).
The blogs then had to install a widget like this one on the right.
The concept looks very much like the free banner exchange concept in the ’90s (and which, by the way, was a failure – I personally tried them at that time).
What is surprising is that the founder doesn’t want to sell the service although he got several offers. Why? That’s a mystery and he won’t tell it, of course. I don’t see the point of not selling to somebody who can keep the service running and maybe deal with all the problems it had. If you care about your users then you find ways to keep the service alive, even if that means selling. Or, at least you recover some of the lost fortune, if nothing else.
We wish you more luck in your future endeavours, John!
The UK mobile social media platform Next2Friends launched the world’s first ‘Live’ mobile video broadcasting application for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl today.
The Blackberries aren’t the only one devices supported. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Samsung are also fully supported by the Next2Friends social mobile network.
This move tappes a segment of industry which nobody has entered so far. To start streaming from your Pearl or Curve, all you need to do is head over to Next2Friends, complete the 60 second free signup, and install the application. You can see a demo in the video below:
Next2Friends Live enables people to share their lives from anywhere, from broadcasting the little things that make up the day, to capturing a must-see-moment, to bringing happenings across the world closer to home.
Some of the new features that have recently been incorporated are one click streaming, the ability to zoom, pause or re-start live streams and automatic quality selection that guarantees the best streaming experience independent of location, carrier or connection speeds.
Right after this launch Next2Friends also announced the Live embeddable Flash widget which allows you to display live videos on your website or anywhere you can use HTML code. Check out an example on Dotlizard.com.
Widget distributor Clearspring has acquired AddThis, a popular social bookmarking tool, for an undisclosed amount of money. “AddThis is the biggest little thing on the Web,” Clearspring Chief Executive Hooman Radfar told Reuters.
Clearspring is a widget syndication service that connects web publishers and advertisers to the social 2.0 crowd out there. All 10,000 registered web publishers can easily create widgets, distribute them to users and then track and monetize the nifty little things. Examples are basketball fans who place a widget containing the stats of their favorite player on their Facebook profile.
You probably know AddThis from the little buttons beneath blog posts, with which you can easily share the content with friends, family, and the rest of the world. According to HitWise, AddThis is more popular than Yahoo, Delicious, or ShareThis.com.
Clearspring raised a total amount of $36 million in the last two years, with a round of $18 million four months ago, thus an acquisition of a service that complement theirs isn’t too surprising. Although we’ll probably see the same reactions as when Sphere got acquired by AOL for about $25 million: are those little buttons actually a business?
But in the end, it all comes down to the viral effect of their services. If your friends are on one travel site, you aren’t likely to register on the other. So badges are vital. Dopplr already offered a public profile and widgets for a while, and now Tripit has added a blog widget to their arsenal as well.
The travel sites choose a completely different style. Ok, they both have the impressive statistics thing going on (as long as you travel a lot, of course), but where Dopplr seems to choose for cool maps and a visually appealing app, Tripit goes for simplicity and a RSS feed:
So.., after reading this post, have you decided how to show of your traveling?
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.
Organizing a competition on your blog is always mentioned as a good way to get your visitors love you more. When Problogger’s Darren Rowse writes a post about creating an active community, competitions won’t go unmentioned. But to organize one is a pain. You’ll have to make up all the procedures and logistics yourself. Not the kind of thing a busy blogger is waiting for. That didn’t go unnoticed by Crystalroot’s Savraj, Kalid, and Lee, who founded the service ContestMachine.
This Y Combinator backed start-up let’s you create a competition widget which you can easily place on your site. There’s your competition! You can specify the prize (of course), what users have to do (answer a question, poll, or just enter their name), customize the design, the deadline, and collect some user data for email news letters. Oh and do you want a random winner or pick the lucky one yourself? The service is free to try out when you organize two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month for ten contests or $90 a year for fifty contests.
It’s funny to see how a widget can make such a complicated thing as a competition really easy. I seriously expect this service to stir up the number of competitions on blogs. The little thing just arouses a feeling of “I have to organize a competition right now!”.
If you’re not a web publisher, you might wonder by this point what’s in it for you? Well, as I said before, you might see more competitions on your blog. But that’s just a wild guess. What’s more concrete, is ContestMachine’s live page. You can check all the running competitions in their network. So if you’re bored for a minute, start winning some prizes!
By the way, we’ll organize another competition this week with Adobe. Stay tuned to see the ContestMachine widget popping up.
I just stumbled across CrowdSound, a slick widget that enables anyone to gather ’social feedback’ from users and customers. There’s inherent value to creating and maintaining a direct dialogue between you and your customers, so I decided to take a look and see if it’s really a good tool to implement in order to improve customer relationships and product development.
CrowdSound is a social widget that allows anyone to become part of a discussion on your site, without the need to leave it, thus allowing a direct conversation between other users and yourself. In fact, the widget allows you to interact without even signing up for an account, so the threshold is pretty low. You can run CrowdSound widgets on your own website or on a CS-hosted one (example).
This is a test widget I set up in a few seconds:
Furthermore, the widget can be customized to fit your site’s look and feel, all to provide a seamless, integrated experience for sharing suggestions and voting on other users’ submissions. CrowdSound allows for suggestions to be marked as ‘private’, allowing a customer to submit a suggestion that can only be seen by your company, and also allowing you to take offline sensitive suggestions that may otherwise be visible to your competitors.
You can also pre-define categories, such as bugs, feature requests, account-specific issues, etc. The company even offers a full-featured iPhone interface for managing CrowdSound conversations on the go.
Some of the features mentioned above are not available in the free version (a pro version sets you back $10 a month), but the basic functionality offered in the free version seems to be sufficient for a test-drive. A non-embeddable (grrr) screencast can be watched here.
Written on 9th April 2009
1 COMMENT 
Written on 11th February 2009
Written on 7th November 2008
In the comments section you can let us know what you think of a certain post (see picture right). From your ratings, we hope to learn what kind of posts you guys like and which can be considered “popular”. 
Written on 30th October 2008
The crazy rush to free traffic for bloggers promised by the 
Widget distributor 
Written on 15th August 2008
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 
