When Pownce announced their "all sales final" closing sale, I wondered if the service would have fared better if Internet celebrity co-founder Kevin Rose had pushed the service instead of pushing everyone into their competitor, Twitter. Today I have the same question about LeWeb organizer and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur. I interviewed Loic back in September and since then he's fired a bunch of the Seesmic staff and I think there have been a lot of questions about how Seesmic will generate real revenue and growth past their loyal users like Freida who clearly make up the majority of...
Despite FriendFeed being available only in English since its debut in October of 2007, almost one third of the service's users use the site in a language other than English, according to co-founder Bret Taylor. As of this morning, the service now also supports six of the most popular non-English languages, in an effort to spur more global growth. Those debuting today include German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.Users who prefer a language other than English can select their language at the bottom of every page, or through the account settings at https://friendfeed.com/account/. Bret says the new languages...
Over the next few years popping a pill could be more than just taking a drug and hoping it works. A biomedical company has created a system to embed tiny computers and sensors into drugs and link them to a cellphone or the internet in a bid to make the monitoring of drug efficacy foolproof. The technology allows for automatic collection of vital patient data that can be used to manage chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. It can be particularly useful to closely track a patient's response to a particular dosage of medicine. Today, the...
In the old days, way back in 2007, some of us cynical types wondered if Facebook would ever amount to anything beyond a place to throw sheep at your friends. Silly us! While we were really talking about Facebook’s ability to generate revenue, and eventually a profit, Facebook’s users have had more ambitious goals: Changing the world. That, at least, is the theme of the grandly named “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit“, which kicks off today at Columbia Law School. The two-day event, organized by video startup Howcast, is supposed help activists brainstorm ways to use Facebook and other social...
NY-based wine resource Snooth has announced several updates to their service geared towards wine merchants. Snooth has launched a set of analytics tools for retailers and wineries where they can view detailed data on where users who are looking for their products are located. This data can help the merchants spend their marketing dollars more wisely. There are also pricing comparison reports which help merchants view the differences in price between online and local merchants. Snooth has also launched group pages as part of a merchant platform which allows winemakers to "claim" their wines. The group pages are basically individual profile...
Mobile television service provider MobiTV announced today that it had passed the 5-million-subscribers mark. This caught our eye, because back in August the service had 4 million subscribers, and at the time we wondered if growth was slowing. According to MobiTV, the opposite is true. Whereas it took the company 10 months to get from 3 million to 4 million subscribers, it took half that time to add an another million. What gives? MobiTV co-founder and president Paul Scanlan told me in a phone interview today that the number counts people who actually pay for the service — but it...
A company called Proximic says it has developed an easier way for consumers to do complex searches from their cell phones. While Apple's iPhone has helped make surfing the Web from a mobile device easier, it's still difficult to type in complex search queries. But Proximic has introduced a new application called Promixic Agents for the iPhone that will help. The new technology, which is language-independent, uses point-and-click technology to highlight bits of text. This means that users don't have to type in a long string of search terms. Search results from a Proximic search.(Credit: Proximic) Unlike other search engines,...
The New York Times’ Claire Miller attended a Churchill Club function to fete Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. In an onstage interview, Williams talked about many different aspects of his micro-blogging service, which now has 6 million subscribers. First of all, wow — that is an impressive jump in the number of subscribers. More importantly, Williams talked about why he chose not to sell to Facebook when the Palo Alto-based startup offered to buy it for $500 million in stock. “It definitely made sense — the strategy we talked about with them — but it wasn’t the right time.” Or the...
Get this. A little over one month from now, you could be sitting in Seth Godin’s office, working as his apprentice. The Seth Godin. The best-selling author, maybe the most respected marketing mind in the online world, and the web’s most beloved bald guy. Yeah, him. If you’re selected, you’ll spend the next six months with Seth and his other apprentices. It’ll be like an MBA, except better. You’ll be learning how to change the world… and he’s going to teach you for free. The catch? You have to convince Seth that you’re worthy of this opportunity and be...
Note from Phil: Stephen Smith is back for another great series of articles on vision, leadership, and the future of great management and great leadership. This is the first in a series of 3. Thanks Stephen! Note: This is a guest post from @Stephen, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen. Back in October I wrote about Communicating Your Vision in this space. As my “digital nomad” business grows and develops, my vision for its development become increasingly important. As the manager of a business, department...
by Rene LeMerle The first major micro-blogging casualty has emerged over the past week. Pownce, a Twitter-like lifestreaming service, announced it was closing its doors (figuratively speaking) mid-December. The Pownce team announced the imminent closure of the service via their blog this week: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.” The Pownce founders and technology are moving across to Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Vox, Movable Type and TypePad. Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be joining the engineering team at Six Apart, hoping to continue...
Filed under: Next big thing Not long ago, the sentiment of Web 2.0 startup founders was fairly consistent. Basically, the IPO market would come back; the online advertising market would continue to grow; and valuations would continue to escalate. Well, it looks like things have not gone according to plan. If anything, it looks like we are seeing the return of the dot-com implosion. However, this can be a good thing for the established players, such as News Corp’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace. In fact, at Reuters Media Summit, the co-founder of that site, Chris DeWolfe, mentioned that he is...
Evan Williams, godfather of Twitter.(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET) At a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams brushed off -- again -- criticisms that the company is slow to turn on its revenue-generating engines. At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because... we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users. But as the conversation went on,...
The closure of Pownce, which was announced Monday via posts by co-founder Leah Culver and her new employer, blog software company Six Apart, didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed Pownce since its launch last year. Despite help from co-founders like Kevin Rose of Digg and usability guru Daniel Burka, the service never really found an audience, or at least not one big enough to make a go of it. In the end, Pownce was just too much like Twitter (and Jaiku and Plurk, for that matter); the added features it had — including the ability...
