The winners of the first ever Seedcamp have been announced.The six winning teams come from all over Europe and represent innovative ideas that have the potential to grow into big businesses. They are Buildersite (UK), RentMineOnline (The Netherlands), TableFinder (Sweden), Zemanta (Slovenia), Kublax (UK), and Project Playfair (Scotland) .
No mobile, no video, no communities (almost). Good or bad?
Technorati teaches:
A four year old startup is pressured to answer how investors will make money. Is it going to be an acquisition or maybe even an IPO? And if neither is the case, then is there reasonable revenue to hope for in the future? It is very likely that these questions caused Technorati to start making changes that ultimately got the company to its current state.
So how does a site like Technorati make money? A simple and fashionable answer is: advertising. But maybe it’s not so simple. Firstly, Technorati could not use straight Google ads. That would not look good and would not fit with the spirit of the company. Banner ads are an alternative, but it is harder to make them relevant. When you are showing people popularity rankings and news stories, banners may be out of place. Technorati ended up using generic banner ads , but how effective these are is unclear.
What Technorati also tried to do, it seems, is refocus on things like books, music and movies. This refocus could allow the company to monetize popular content via affiliate programs. This a straightforward play, but the problem is that people do not come to Technorati for that. The users are there for popular stories, hot blogs and trends. You do not exactly think of Technorati when you are thinking about buying a book. For that you go straight to Amazon.
Monetization is a big issue that cannot be ignored. After all, just having a cool service that makes no money is impossible. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a while I’m looking at the italian development of web 2.0 and I’m pleased to read the raise of blognation Italy.
Lots of posting regarding italians start-ups and the difficult situation of venture capital. Finding seed investors for internet companies in Italy is a real problem but there are numerous initiativies to look at.
Read the lauch post , have fun and read the rest.
I think Italy at the moment misses the numbers (few people and companies around web 2.0) but it’s grewing fast.
iPhone is finally released (500000 sold over the weekend). Web apps seems to be one of the main scope of the ipone a a lot of companies are hurring to develop a mobile version of their web (2.0?) application.
Interesting is Clippz.com, a service that lets you download “optimized video clips” from the Internet to a mobile device (a process it calls ’sideloading’). Clippz has announced it is offering more than 500 MySpace, Metacafe and YouTube collections encoded in Apple iPhone’s H.264 file format.
Check out last100 for more on that interview, plus some early examples of iPhone apps.
WebOS vendor Morfik has created a platform for developers to build applications for Apple’s iPhone, which is being released Friday night. Morfik claims this is the first development tool for the iPhone.
Up till this point, no one had announced a development tool for the iPhone – although there have been suggestions by bloggers that Adobe AIR and Google GWT might become iPhone development platforms. However, it seems Morfik is the first to do it.
My personal opinion is that mobile 2.0 is more than using web application while moving. The major advantage should be interact with the place you actually are. But for this the iPhone is missing some more hardware like hi-speed connection and gps at least. Isn’t it?
Future Exploration Network has created a great document on web 2.0 framework
There are three key parts to the Web 2.0 Framework, as shown below:
Web 2.0 Framework
* Web 2.0 is founded on seven key Characteristics: Participation, Standards, Decentralization, Openness, Modularity, User Control, and Identity.
* Web 2.0 is expressed in two key Domains: the Open web, and the Enterprise.
* The heart of Web 2.0 is how it converts Inputs (User Generated Content, Opinions, Applications), through a series of Mechanisms (Technologies, Recombination, Collaborative Filtering, Structures, Syndication) to Emergent Outcomes that are of value to the entire community.
Web 2.0 Definitions
* We define the Web 2.0 Characteristics, Domains, and Technologies referred to in the Framework.
* Ten definitions for Web 2.0 are provided, including the one I use to pull together the ideas in the Framework: “Distributed technologies built to integrate, that collectively transform mass participation into valuable emergent outcomes.”
Web 2.0 Landscape
* Sixty two prominent Web 2.0 companies and applications are mapped out across two major dimensions: Content Sharing to Recommendations/ Filtering; and Web Application to Social Network. The four spaces that emerge at the junctions of these dimensions are Widget/ component; Rating/ tagging; Aggregation/ Recombination; and Collaborative filtering. Collectively these cover the primary landscape of Web 2.0.
Pdf with the slides is here
Sclipo, a social skills-network based upon user-generated videos, has won the Startup 2.0 contest, whose final was hold yesterday at the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. The second place was for a very similar project coming from Israel, 5min, while the third prize will go for Properazzi, crawler-based web 2.0 property search engine for all of Europe.
Startup 2.0 was opened to all webs 2.0 from Europe. A total of 260 projects coming from the main European countries took part in it. The 5 finalists presented their projects yesterday in Bilbao before an audience of 300 people. The jury interrogated each one of them for 15 minutes.
Sclipo is a platform for any kind of skills, such as cooking, well-being, technology or sports. All content is 100% user-generated and evaluated. It stands for: Skills + CLIP + yO (=I). It is based in Barcelona and has an international team managed by Gregor Gimmy. Its business model is based on contextual advertising, market research and premium user services.
These are the finalist projects por this year’s Startup 2.0 contest: 5min, 11870.com, Sclipo, Trivop and Properazzi.
They will be in Bilbao on May, 24th.
