Twitter Influencer Topical Clouds
From CenterNetworks, popular since 3 monthsThese screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.    This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd, Michael Arrington, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, and Brian Solis.(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, [...]Go to site
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Amazon's S3 storage service appears to be down. CenterNetworks images are broken because of it and I had to move the style sheet back so the site at least renders correctly. Sites like Twitter have massive broken images currently because Amazon S3 is down.We will keep updating this post until the service has recovered. As of Noon Eastern time, the S3 service is down.Amazon's S3 service was also down this past February and Amazon explained the reasons for the outage and downtime a few days later. There has to be a way to failover when S3 is down.As always report in if you are having issues with Amazon S3.Update: Amazon S3 clients are now posting outage messages on the forums. It appears EC2 is working ok.Update 2: Amazon is now reporting on their health dashboard that Amazon S3 has "elevated error rates".Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Are there actually startups outside of Sillicon Valley and the USA? For us Europeans this is quite an akward question. Of course there are startups here. And thanks to Mike Butcher and TechCrunch and his European tour we can show the world how great our startup scene actually is. As one of twelve cities on the tour, Mike came to Zurich on July 17th. As a techblogger and engineer myself and as a CenterNetworks writer, I had the great pleasure to attend, take photos and videotape the event. One of the highlights of the evening was the 20-second pitches each startup had the opportunity to give. We have compiled together a video with all the pitches. If you have 14 minutes and want to see a variety of Swiss startups, check it out below. I've also included some photos as well - over 150 people attended. Please share your thoughts on any of the startups represented in the video. Editor's note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness. Also, we've provided reviews of two of the startups from the event, Poken and Mixin. Â 
 
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Mixin is a new Swiss-based startup that aims to aggregate your activities into a timeline/agenda. Basically the way Mixin works is that it can aggregate your event timeline from sites like Twitter and you can also place events directly into your timeline through Mixin.Here's an example Mixin activity page. It's basically like a messageboard thread where you start the thread with your event. Your friends can then note if they plan to attend, leave comments and embed photos and videos. Events can be sent to Mixin by mobile sms, IM and email as well. Then you can post the event to Facebook and/or Twitter. There's also an API so developers can build on top of what Mixin offers.There's color-coding for event types so you know whether to pull out your finest shoes or flip-flops. When you setup your friends list in Mixin, you can decide if they person is just an online friend, or if they are a "real" friend by placing a star next to their name. Friend updates can be sent to your email or mobile.Notifications can be setup daily to remind you of upcoming events. It would be great if you could include an address for the event or a conference URL. There's a link to Google Maps but without a specific address it won't work correctly. A connection into Google Calendar and the other online calendar applications would also round out the service.You can also embed your timeline into a blog, Website or email. Here's what my embedded Mixin timeline looks like:
Mixin supports OpenID and the overall interface is pretty slick. The "how to use" guide is very interesting as it actually layers on top of the service so you can interact with the service while looking at the help.This is one of the most interesting services I've seen as of late. It aggregates and leverages content from other sources but can also survive alone. I could see Mixin doing very well if it can gain some level of traction.
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Boston-based Internship Ratings helps you find the right internship by reading reviews and ratings from others on their internships. The service went live about six months ago and currently features 150 companies and has over 200 members. There's also an Internship Ratings blog which features a variety of experts discussing the various facets of internships.The service appears to be ad-supported. Internship Ratings has a Facebook page but doesn't link to it from their site. This type of service has huge potential if they apply a social layer to the site. Why can't I friend other users? Where's the profile page for users who have signed up that has their social network contact info? Most importantly, where's the internship job board? Why not help students find internships? Where are the video comments? Where's the reviews feed? This site targets one of the most ideal demographic sets, but is barely offering anything more than a simple (but good looking) review board. The service is up for six months, it's time to make it sticky.Internship Ratings was founded by two Boston University business school students, Stephanie Gurtman and Lauren Grunstein. Amanda Gravel interviewed the pair of entrepreneurs at an event this week in Boston. Here's the brief interview:Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
During the TWS2008 startup conference in Israel, one of the interesting segments of the day featured three venture capitalists attempting to pitch the audience on a product. The product was not shared with them ahead of time and all they had to work from was the live powerpoint slides on the screen. What resulted was a bit of improv comedy that has a few funny bits.From this first video, I will share the following line, "It's the long tail of chickens"Â From this second video which offers two improv pieces, "What about people that you don't know or that you don't know but think you know that you don't know." and "Look at this photo of Girls Aloud"Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
This afternoon comment reputation service SezWho announced three new partnerships. We covered the news along with several other sites.On the Entrecard side, JoeTech put together 10 reasons why the SezWho/Entrecard partnership is important for bloggers. In the Entrecard community, the SezWho service seems to be well received so far.Frederic at ReadWriteWeb has a different perspective on the announcements. His article title suggests that SezWho is in desperation mode and signed these deals to try to catchup with Disqus. Frederic notes, "Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate." and concludes by noting that Izea is deceptive, Creative Blogging is spammy and Entrecard is niche. I'd like to share my thoughts on his post.Never once when I read the news did I think that these were moves that signal desperation. Distribution is key for a service like SezWho and while many tech bloggers hate Izea and CEO Ted Murphy, he has access to a large number of bloggers. That's a smart business move because if any of the Izea bloggers take the SezWho service and subsequently leave Izea, they keep SezWho. And note that I am not a big fan of what Izea is doing either, but having been on the corporate marketing side for nearly 10 years, I get what they are offering. Using Izea as a middleman to get to their set of bloggers for distribution makes sense.Frederic also notes that "SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate..." I'd love to see concrete proof of why SezWho is under a lot of stress from the valley darling Disqus? Both Disqus and Intense Debate are building strong products but because SezWho isn't a valley darling, does that mean they are facing pressure and stress? In fact, Intense Debate isn't a valley darling either but is building a strong product.We see over and over where one company in an category is a valley darling and gets constant hype (no matter their results) while another company continues to build a product without the hype.The hypothetical question for Frederic is, if Disqus made the exact same deals today, would you have said that Disqus was in a desperate situation against JS-Kit, Intense Debate and SezWho?I'd also like to add that I think it was a mistake for SezWho and FutureWorks (the PR agency) to go out with all three releases at one time. I've written about the news flow topic before but knowing that many Web tech bloggers find Izea's services to run on the other side of the fine line, splitting Izea out into a seperate release would have made sense. This would have allowed Entrecard and Creative Blogging to not lose the spotlight over the Izea discussion.Even more importantly, by splitting up these releases by a few weeks, this would help to keep SezWho top of mind. By sending out three at once, now we may run into a "cold" period for SezWho news. I am sure Brian and his team at FutureWorks have a plan but I wanted to share my thoughts for other startups that don't have a PR firm. Space out your news and keep your brand top of mind.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Userplane has been on a roll with their distribution deals recently. Userplane has created widgets for a variety of content management systems and most recently partnered with ConVerdge on chat and IM integration.Today NY-based KickApps and AOL-subsidiary Userplane are announcing a partnership which will bring live chat, IM and presence functionality into the KickApps social networking platform. Both the Userplane Webchat and Userplane Webmessenger tools will carry advertising and publishers can also use a buyout option to remove or control the ads within the widgets.Check out our exclusive interviews with Userplane CEO Michael Jones and KickApps CEO Alex Blum.On a side note, KickApps is now referring to their service as the, "World’s First Social Graph Engine". I wonder if they paid a marketing firm to come up with that tagline!Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Virtual events provider ON24 announced this morning that they have raised over $8 million in equity and expansion capital financing, bringing their total to $46 million venture capital raised to-date. U.S. Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and Rho Ventures led the equity round; while Gold Hill Capital led the expansion capital financing. The company notes that the funding will be used to "accelerate ON24's global expansion of the sales, marketing and client services organizations; and product development initiatives, including ON24 Virtual Show and the company's flagship webcasting platform."ON24 reports sales growth of 40% year-over-year. ON24 offers a "Virtual Show" product (see screenshot below). I get the idea of virtual (i.e remote) conferences and the associated cost benefits. But does it need to look like a virtual world too? I'd prefer a simple Web page with the different rooms and events rather than this silly, goofy mall-like atmosphere. What's the cost to build these virtual worlds? I am guessing there are some standard setups but I am sure that most exhibitors want something custom. Just because something is x in real-life, doesn't mean that online we need to recreate x.
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We initially came across Divshare when they won the first free advertising slot on CenterNetworks last year. We interviewed Divshare Co-Founder David Altschul as well. In November the site went up for sale but it looks like a deal never closed. Last month it appears that Divshare had a security scare.David tells me that this week, version 3.0 of the Divshare application launched. They have redesigned the user dashboard, created a "desktop-feel" to the application to make it easier to upload and share. The sharing function has been simplified and seems similar to basic php upload scripts - which is a good thing. David also noted that all videos, photo galleries, MP3s and documents are converted to an individual embeddable Flash player, while the original file is retained and downloadable. You can also choose to keep all files private. This seems similar to what drop.io offers.David shared the following stats with us: 600,000 registered users (no active number provided) and 100,000 new users monthly. He also noted that the Divshare service is being used by record labels, DJs, web designers and churches.With the enormous number of file sharing services on the market today, innovation and differentation is key.
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There’s been a bit of back and forth on what the best place to start a technology company is these days. The conventional wisdom these days is that the place to start and run a technology company is Silicon Valley. The key reasons put forth to justify this is money, talent, and expertise. If you’re initially choosing where to move and start a company, Silicon Valley seems to be the right choice based on the confluence of these factors – but I would argue that in some cases these advantages are not that strong and there are just as good reasons to start it elsewhere.MoneyMost of the time when people are talking about money in the context of startups, they’re talking about access to capital, particularly in the early stages of a company. Menlo Park has perhaps the highest concentration of VCs around, at least those focused on technology companies, but for the most part they don’t limit investments based on geography. Sequioa says it is "helpful" if seed and early stage companies are close, but in the last year they've done Series A investments in companies in Shanghai, Honolulu, Virginia, and Israel. The Foundry Group has long said they invest in themes, not geography, and Chris Wand has a great article about how geography is overblown. In any case, there are no shortage of VC regional offices in places like Boston, New York, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Boulder.The more relevant piece is that there is more early stage capital available. The area is stock full of entrepreneurs with previous successes willing to pump that money into potentially new successes. But there’s also a dark side to this. First, Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places around - and if you factor in the need for a car (or two, if you’re a married couple and work in different place) and so on, it can even be more expensive than New York (which is usually one of the biggest knocks on our beloved city). Contrast this to raising a small friends and family round in Austin, Pittsburgh, or Colorado – you may have less available cash, but talent and office space (by far the two biggest drains) are a small fraction of what they are in NYC or Silicon Valley.In other words, there may be less early stage money available, but you need less.To put price in perspective, you can buy a beautiful new 4 bedroom home in Pittsburgh for $250,000 - a fraction of what you would spend a studio apartment here or in San Fran. The going rate for a small office that can house 5-6 people here seems to be around $3,000 plus utilities - that same space in Pittsburgh seems to be going for $800-1,400. That's a big difference.TalentTalent is a funny thing. There's obviously a lot of startup-minded technical folks who either went to Stanford or Berkley or move to Silicon Valley because they were interested in working in a startup. They know what they’re getting themselves into as far as potentially deferred compensation.Again, though, that doesn't mean that there isn't great technical talent elsewhere. The cities I mentioned before - Pittsburgh, Austin, Boulder - all have great engineering programs producing local, young talent. There’s also great talent in NYC - you should see some of the engineering that goes on at financial institutions, with people used to working with large datasets and so on. The problem is that New York is not built, financially and otherwise, to support the startup lifestyle. Now, as Charlie mentioned, not everyone here is an investment banker or lawyer who makes $300,000 – in fact, we have a thriving struggling artist scene with cheap rent, etc. Of course, good development talent doesn’t typically associate with that “poor” mentality. That said, with such a focus on the corporate lifestyle, being able to come to the office in shorts and a t-shirt and work flexible hours is a nice draw, and people are willing to make a little less with that equity upside to live that lifestyle. And remember, no one gets rich working for a boss - they get rich through entrepreneurship (or being involved in a startup early enough to reap the benefits of an exit).Going a step further, I think some cities like the ones I mentioned already – given how inexpensive they are – are really viable epicenters for technology companies. I’m not sure if it makes sense to move to Austin or Pittsburgh to start a company, but if you graduate from UT or Carnegie Mellon, it certainly makes sense to stay. Pittsburgh in particular has been working very hard to try to keep their engineering talent and foster a high-tech scene, offering lots of tax and other incentives to get people to stay. Rodrigo of Sonya Labs talks a little about the dynamics of Pittsburgh trying to become a startup hub, and the opening of Alpha Lab should help there. One thing I will say that I’ve noticed is that, unlike Silicon Valley, very few people move to NYC to start a company. Rather, they happen to be here (for whatever reason) and decide to stay and start something. It’s interesting to me that there doesn’t seem to be any real incubators here in New York City. It seems like this would be a big start for getting people to start more companies here, especially given how expensive office space is. People like Charlie and his team at Path101 have been able to use donated office space, but there’s no YCombinatator or TechStars program here, or even something like AlphaLabs. There’s Rose Tech’s SparkSpace, but I struggle to put that in the true incubator space - “starting at $200/month for a virtual office for starving entrepreneurs”. Granted, they don’t take an equity stake, but contrast this to the incubators in Boston, Silicon Valley, Boulder and so on. The NYSIA Incubator closed earlier this year. I’m not really familiar with any others – though feel free to point out anything I’m missing in the comments and I will update the post accordingly.ExpertiseSomeone mused recently that there’s plenty of early-stage money in New York, but not as much what we would call “smart money”. And it is certainly true that less of the wealth in NY was created by those in the technology/Internet space as compared to Silicon Valley – but as I’ll talk more about later, not only might this not be a bad thing – it might actually be a good thing. Misconception #1: We are not second-class citizensOne big misconception I want to clear up is the idea that in Not Silicon Valley, you’re a second-class citizen when you’re in a tech startup. That’s simply not true. As Charlie put it,I have to be honest—I’ve felt that way several times, but mostly from people outside NYC. Within the city, I’ve actually felt really supported. Most of my 21 angel investors are not only in NYC, but they’re either NYC natives or have lived most of their lives here. Among my large diverse group of friends (I grew up here, went to school here, never lived anywhere else, and know tons of people doing very different professions), I’ve received fantastic support. No one ever asks me why I don’t just go into investment banking or trading. And this isn't just within the NYC tech community. None of my former colleagues have "looked down on me" for leaving to this - in fact, many have said they wish they could do something like this as well. I would imagine the feeling is the same elsewhere. In his Cities and Ambition article, Paul Graham said Silicon Valley is all about startups. “What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.” I tell you what – power matters just as much as money in New York!Avoiding the Echo ChamberIn fact, I would put it another way: In Silicon Valley, you’re just another guy or gal with a startup. You’re a small fish in a medium-size pond that thinks it is the only pond out there. It’s really no secret that the tech community – and Silicon Valley especially, it seems – are huge echo chambers. Mark puts this well in his discussion of bubbles and business models. I've been noticing a common theme in the Valley the past few weeks and it got me to thinking. We finally have some proof that things are changing here in the Valley. In fact, we may be at the end of our nice little bubble. Sure, lots of people don't think we're in a bubble, but I do, and I have for quite a while. At least now I have some proof.So what's been happening lately that makes me think this? It's all of the startups who are "changing their business model". Company after company has been singing this tune of late. Why? Well, for one, just having tons of users isn't going to bring in the cash like they thought it would. Monetizing these users has been a challenge. I usually hate making broad statements like this, but in general we’ve noticed an interesting pattern: when we meet with West Coast-based investors, they tend in general to gloss over our “monetization” slide. “Lead generation, advertising and data analytics? Ok, done, let’s move on.” Almost every one of these folks was more concerned with how we’re going to get traction. They wanted to see how we’re going to get 10 or 100 million users.This is in stark contrast to some of the discussions we’ve had with NY-based firms. NY firms don't ignore traction and growth, but they are also more concerned with how. In some cases, these were investors targeting much earlier stages – like, the “2 guys with a company and no employees and maybe a prototype stage” – who were pushing us much further on the actual revenue strategy. (Not specific numbers, but they clearly wanted us to focus more energy there).One of Corey’s favorite quotes is that “you should stay in New York but leave before it makes you hard, and stay in California but leave before it makes you soft.” Put another way, it’s easy to become complacent and tied up in the “local mindset”.Don’t start "West Coast companies" on the West Coast I would say the Notches mind-set is distinctively West Coast. As I’ve written about here on occasion, we’re free because we want to disrupt - our model is built around getting traction and generating data and “figuring it all out later”. I initially approached these business-minded questions with some skepticism but I’m quickly starting to appreciate those challenges. Just because our assumptions are being challenged doesn’t mean they’re wrong or that those challenging them "just don't get it" – in fact, the reason we have bubbles in the first place is this unchecked optimism.You should start a company in an environment where it is not an echo chamber for you. Start a company where the people in the community bring a different perspective, because this will ultimately help you get a better picture of the world. If you’re a finance guy, you’re probably best not starting a tech company in NYC. As location matters less, maybe it’s better to start a company where you don't feel comfortable and see eye-to-eye with everyone.Plus, from an expertise perspective, we have a lot more models on how to get traction than we do on how to make money. The bigger concern now for a video site is not how to get traction, but how to make money once they do. If anyone is going to figure that out, I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was in NYC.Maybe the fact that NYC is so focused on money isn't a bad thing. After all, we're not building technology, we're building technology companies. As much as I subscribe to the "business models happen" philosophy, there's some merit to being focused on the money earlier - or at least being challenged on it.Tim Marman is co-founder of Notches, an early stage startup currently based in NYC. Notches is a free, open reviews network that anyone can participate in and anyone can build on top of. Check out their blog for more details. var idcomments_acct = 'e9d6471172e3f2af86b1ee7675f3f60f';var idcomments_post_id = 'http://slashstar.com/blogs/tim/archive/2008/07/08/why-you-shouldn-t-start-a-tech-company-in-silicon-valley.aspx';var idcomments_post_url = 'http://slashstar.com/blogs/tim/archive/2008/07/08/why-you-shouldn-t-start-a-tech-company-in-silicon-valley.aspx';var idcomments_post_title = "Why you SHOULDN’T start a tech company in Silicon Valley - Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled"; Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Earlier this morning we reported on Vivaty going live with their public beta of a social virtual world creation tool. Not even 24 hours later, Google is out with their own social virtual world creator, Lively. Adam Ostrow has an indepth review of the Lively application. Here's the basics -- you create an avatar and a virtual room. Sounds like Second Life right? Well it's similar but different - you don't fly around to endless worlds of stupidity - instead you get a "Lively Room" and an avatar.Ostrow says this Lively concept came from the 20% of time that Googlers are able to work on their own creations. You will soon be able to import friends from other social networks and chat platforms. You can add all sorts of Google products into your Lively Room including YouTube videos and a search panel. You can take your avatar on the road and place him or her into any Lively Room across the Web.This is the perfect product for the pre-teen. Get them hooked into Google's products now so as they grow and enter the business market, they select Google for their product needs. I assume just like Vivaty's product, we will see sponsored items inside of the Lively Rooms soon. It's a potential income diversification play; something Wall Street has been demanding for quite a while.This is really identical to what Vivaty launched today - quite scary almost. Vivaty will need to keep innovating to stay ahead of Google's Lively, especially because Google's pockets run very deep. The business sponsored concept is key for Vivaty.
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Yesterday I spoke with JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux who briefed me on several major updates for JS-Kit and their product roadmap. The first update is that JS-Kit has acquired comment replacement service HaloScan for an undisclosed sum. Loux says that HaloScan was actually the first comment replacement system and has over 500,000 active blog installations. He says while the new crop of comment replacement services including Intense Debate and Disqus are getting some press lately, HaloScan is "magnitudes larger". This size was the reason that JS-Kit has acquired HaloScan. Loux believes that these comment replacement services must have very large scale to be successful - and that HaloScan gives JS-Kit that size.The acquisition is an IP-only acquisition and JS-Kit bought the distribution and customer base. They are currently swapping out the widgets in place that are branded HaloScan to use the JS-Kit widget and it should be transparent to the blog owners. They are 20% done with the swap so far and currently are replicating all comment data into both systems to make certain that nothing is lost. The new JS-Kit is adding sites at 300/day and will have over 8 million users.The only question I have is why they didn't push JS-Kit functionality into HaloScan and kept the HaloScan name. I've never been a fan of the JS-Kit name, it's no longer just a javascript kit of tools.As for the new features, they include a portable comment profile, comment synchronization and search engine accessibility. The portable comment profile screenshot is listed below. Loux noted that unlike Disqus, JS-Kit isn't redirecting users back to their site - everything goes back to the content creator.The synchronization feature which is called "sync" is game changing I believe for comment replacement systems. If you've read my previous posts around this technology, one of my concerns is what happens if the company goes out of business. Your site's comments are gone forever as well. JS-Kit believes they have the answer using Sync. What Sync does is pull in comments from your current platform and then back updates live to the blog software you use. So let's assume you put JS-Kit on your blog, tomorrow a person makes a commment. That comment is sent behind the scenes back to your blog commenting system along with the JS-Kit powered comment. This means that you can turn off JS-Kit anytime and still maintain your complete comment base. Sync currently works with Wordpress and Blogger blogs and Loux says more platforms are coming.The other update is that now there's SEO (search engine optimization) support for your comment data - everything will be indexed properly.Loux concluded by saying that they don't compete on lock-in like the other comment replacement services do. He believes they must keep innovating to keep your business.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
There's been a few exciting things I remember as a kid growing up including: when Hogan slammed Andre, getting my first GameBoy and working at the transit museum. But those totally pale in comparison to the announcment made this morning that TinyURL now supports custom URLs.It's all the talk this morning! Louis Gray was able to take a 2-line announcement and turn it into a full product review. Louis points to a post by Steve Gillmor - unfortunately my GilmorDecoder hasn't arrived yet so I can't comment on that post.Gray is clearly mislead, it's probably because he ate too many brats last night. He notes, "You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren't being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site."And now, ladies and gents, here's an example of why what he just wrote makes no sense :) - Here's a TinyURL I just created - here, click this: http://tinyurl.com/seagate (don't worry it's not malware or Rick Astley). Now do you see why this isn't going to protect you any better than before? In fact, it might be worse because now the evil people can use URLs that look like legit companies only to send you somewhere bad. I imagine the email scammers will love this new feature.If TinyURL wanted to offer some new features that would be seriously beneficial, they could add account functionality to save created URLs into lists. They could also offer statistics which could lead to even more goodness as they could show hot and top links and create real content discovery. Perhaps TinyURL could offer a stumbleupon-style feature as well.In all seriousness, this is a feature that everyone's asked TinyURL to create but I don't know if it's really that important. It will make it easier for the linker but the same for the linkee. I certainly hope that TinyURL users don't stop linking directly to Web sites and instead link to TinyURLs. Most times, the TinyURL is behind the scenes and never heard from. Do you think you are really more likely to click a URL on Twitter if it says http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft than http://www.tinyurl.com/425c35s? Doubt it. Trust the source, not the URL.I use MooURL because it's cuter and looks better.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
We reviewed photo sharing site Photwo when they launched in January. I said that it was the easiest photo sharing site I've seen at that point. The site is based out of Norway and founder Magnus K S Andersen tells me that their business model was to sell prints and premium features. Check out our review for more analysis on Photwo.The company has shared some stats regarding Photwo usage:Currently the site has 2,477 users and 11,306 photos uploadedPage views/month: 33,425Pagerank 4Uniques/Month: 3,239The site was listed this morning on Sitepoint auctions for sale. The minimum bid is $2,000 and so far there have been no bids. Looks like the auction goes for two more weeks. The auction also includes a Norwegian version of this site.Here's an example gallery:powered by Photwo.comPartner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Next week the Apple iPhone 3G will be released and the lines will be long. I put together the video below to cover two topics: why I am not purchasing an iPhone 3G and why Apple is a brilliant company. Here are just a few notes from the video:I won't be purchasing the iPhone because it's too expensive and because I found it hard to type. The Web browser and mobile applications will be awesome and that I will certainly miss, but my Samsung Ace matches it in all other areas. I found the Ace easier to type on, in fact I can write entire blog posts easily on the Ace whereas I was unable to on the iPhone. The cost difference in a nearly identical comparison is nearly $800 for the year and that's just way too much to consider. My take is that people with the iPhone beta (the current model) will likely upgrade to the iPhone 3G but Apple's ability to draw in new customers will be limited.The other part of the video covers why Apple is such a brilliant company. They have been able to create a new product lifecycle for mobile devices. Most people keep their mobile device at least 2 years which is the typical contract term. Apple has been able to push the iPod cycle into the mobile device world. Next year there will be a new iPhone and current iPhone fans will upgrade to get the new features. And the next year, and the next. I haven't seen any major gadget blogs discussing this topic but it's worth a look. It means that iPhone users will be locked into a contract for life (in Internet years) basically.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
You know Expedia, right? They began life as a Microsoft company. Yesterday they were fired from MSN. Get out, pack your bags and get out! Beginning yesterday, MSN Travel is now hitched with Orbitz. This change affects customers in the U.S. and in the U.K.Kyle Peterson from Forbes notes that a Microsoft spokesman said the company decided to switch to Orbitz because it preferred the travel site's features and customer service.The monthly traffic that will now be diverted in the air to Orbitz is in the range of 3.5 million unique visitors per month. When I check Expedia's status board, all lines say "Delayed". This is a big hit for Expedia.In my opinion Expedia's usability is much better than Orbitz. Was this deal completed for the reasons listed above or really for financial reasons?Last month we took a look at Expedia's traffic using Google Trends. Here's a chart of Expedia vs. Orbitz. Currently Expedia shows 2x more traffic than Orbitz. This MSN Travel deal could easily bring both companies together in terms of site traffic.
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Dan Frommer from SAI sat down with NY Times chief technology officer Marc Frons to find out what's going on at the newspaper's digital division. Last week we interviewed NY Times Blogrunner Product Manager Philippe Lourier about where their blog aggregation tool is headed. Frommer gets a good look and more information on the NY Times overall digital strategy.The interview focuses on content syndication, widgets, aggregation (w/Blogrunner), social overlay (w/TimesPeople) and Personalization. They are also planning iPhone apps and APIs so that developers can pull data out of their content repository. I am very excited to see that they are thinking about widgets. Why not get the NY Times content out all over the Web and potentially monetize the widgets or do a revshare with the partner sites. Frommer grabbed a screenshot of what the most popular widget might look like when it launches this summer.I'd like to see more content discovery -- the site is certainly overwhelming in content. What works in print doesn't always translate to the Web. Perhaps they can learn from the Web 2.0 services that are creating strong discovery engines based on your profile and preferences.As I pointed out to Philippe, the NY Times is sitting on a gold mine and they haven't opened the doors yet to share and sell the gold. The online news landscape could change once those doors open up.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software