Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Startup 2.0 on again this year in Barcelona

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/4/2008
in Web 2.0 and startups
. 4 Comments

This year’s Startup 2.0, a European competition for Web 2.0 startups, was launched the other day.

Submissions are accepted for blogs, wikis, social networks or any other website which makes a high use of Web 2.0 components, such as tags, RSS, collaboration or Ajax. Companies and people from any European country willing to present their projects just have to submit them.

Entries are judged not only the quality of the website but also the business model and the creativity of their video presentation. Internet users and a jury will select 10 projects to be presented in Barcelona on May 21st, where they will compete for online advertising and infrastructure prizes for their project. Last year’s winners won 5 days advertising on the front page of TechCrunch.com as far as I recall amongst other prizes.

The contest is organized by Alianzo and La Caixa bank as a non-profit initiative, supported by Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and sponsored by 22@Barcelona.

I am one of the 10 jury members who will be judging the entries along with Martín Varsavsky, Loic Le Meur, Daniel Waterhouse, Ouriel Ohayon, Nicole Simon, Bernardo Hernández, Luca Conti and Yaron Orenstein.

If you want your startup to be entered for this competition, register on the site before April 30th.

Trendpedia launches Blog Search

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/4/2008
in Web 2.0 and blogsearch
. 0 Comments

TrendPedia Blog Search

Simon from Attentio pinged me yesterday to let me know about their latest offering, Trendpedia. In Simon’s own words Trendpedia:

is in essence a European Blog search with a lovely trend function.

We have some more cool stuff to come, will keep you in the loop.

In the example above I looked for mentions of my name along with the terms Apple, Microsoft and Energy. I was surprised by the high showing of Microsoft vs. Apple and interested to note the upward trend of the term Energy since I started my LowerFootprint.com blog.

I can see lots of ways this can be improved (can anyone say widget?) but for a simple first off offering, I like what it does. Well done guys.

Will the Irish Times ever learn?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/11/2007
in Web 2.0
. 4 Comments

Back in September the New York Times went from a subscription model to free for almost all of its content. The thinking being that the ad revenue from the extra pageviews would be greater than the loss in subs.

The Wall Street Journal has now gone the free route too. According to this Associated Press story, Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch said:

We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million (subscribers), having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth

The article went on to state that:

Murdoch said he believes that a free model, with increased readership for wsj.com, will attract “large numbers” of big-spending advertisers.

When the New York Times went free I asked, how long before the Irish Times realises the folly of its paywall? When hell freezes over seemed to be the consensus! Now with the Wall Street Journal also going free, why would anyone pay for online news? And when will the Irish Times realise the folly of its paywall? The longer they have it in place, the less relevant they (and their writers) become.

UPDATE: - The New York Times online readership has soared since they stopped charging for access (no surprise there) according to numbers released today by neilsen.

My Web 2.0 Expo Keynote presentation on reducing our carbon footprint

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/11/2007
in Global Warming, Web 2.0, carbon neutrality, climate change and energy
. 1 Comment

I’m back in Cork after giving one of the keynote addresses at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on Wednesday and speaking on a blogging panel at Microsoft’s TechEd in Barcelona on Thursday.

I didn’t create any formal presentation for the blogging panel in Barcelona but for anyone who might be interested, I uploaded my Web 2.0 Expo Keynote presentation to SlideShare:

Google’s OpenSocial to become the platform’s platform?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2007
in Technology and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

One of the biggest problems with Social Networks is that your information is never synchronised across them if you are in more than one and if you are in only one, the time you invest adding in information, is time you are investing in locking yourself in. You can’t get your information (profile, friends list, feeds, etc.) exported and you therefore need to start over when you join another network.

Google, it is being reported on TechCrunch, are set to launch OpenSocial (url to go live tomorrow (Thursday)) to help with this.

OpenSocial will be a one-stop-shop for APIs for developers to add applications/information to a number of Social Networks. This one-stop-shop will become a de-facto platform for Social Networks. According to TechCrunch:

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The participating Social Networks, so far, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle while the application developers (who developed some of the most popular FaceBook applications) signed up include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

FaceBook is conspicuous in its absence. This is a massive challenge to its dominance by probably the only player who could take them on head-to-head.

As you can imagine Marc Canter, who has been hammering away for more openness for Social Networks for as long as I can remember and whose PeopleAggregator product has been an open network aggregator since it launched in June 2006 is very impressed with this development. As marc said in his own post on this:

Man oh Man - this is getting fun.

For the record - we at Broadband Mechanics will be supporting ALL THIS STUFF and making it available to OUR customers. Though right now I’m in NYC making those customers happy and actually building systems using PeopleAggregator.

So there you have it - the future has arrived and it rocks. Thank you Google (and I have to admit I never thought I’d be saying that.) Now what about Apple?

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!