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Blog 913
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Nifty little trick: embed parts of a YouTube video
You probably recognize the situation of wanting to embed a YouTube video that is interesting for ten seconds. If only it wouldn’t take five minutes before the video reaches that point. Alex Chitu from Google Operating System writes that YouTube’s embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video.
Here’s how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs. When you use this, you’ll get…
There’s no permalink to a certain part of a video. The only way of getting there is clicking on a video that’s embedded with the right parameters. According to Philipp Lenssen, a generic wrapper site could be created for that purpose. -
Harsh economy is biting: Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic let go 7 e
Recently, Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital advised startups to tighten their belts for the crunch times ahead. There’s no safe haven for startups. Except, to a degree, for those which already generate revenue and profit.
Companies that have already raised money need to monitor every penny spent from now on. Those trying to raise money will have a hard time finding investors if they don’t have a real business plan. It seems that the idea of “we’ll figure out later how to make money, first let’s concentrate on acquiring users” is dying.
One company which is trying to navigate in today’s troublesome waters is Seesmic.
Loic Le Meur, the founder and CEO of the company, just announced on his blog that it will let go seven employees (about one third of Seesmic workforce). That’s on top of another three employees who were let go already a few weeks ago. Not good news, but at least he was open and said it straight… It is very open with the press too - he was very fast in responding to some of my questions as well.
Seesmic raised about $12 million dollars so far. The last $6 million round raised a few months ago came from Wellington Partners and Omidyar Network. Seesmic acquired the Adobe AIR desktop client Twhirl which allows users to access the Twitter service directly from their desktop, and also cross post to other services (Pownce, Jaiku being one of them).
Hopefully, they will have enough money to get out on the other side of the tunnel.
Good luck, Seesmic!
Now, I suppose we will hear more news about these kind of lay-off’s from other startups.
Jason Calacanis warn us that 50%-80% of the venture-backed companies will not make it or be on life support in the next 18 months.
But venture capitalist William Quigley (Clearstone Venture Partners) has a more cold-blooded assesment of the situation (via Venturebeat).
Five years after the dot com crash, investors came to realize that in fact Internet and telco centric business models (think Google, RIMM) were among the most profitable businesses of our era. This lesson is now well known. What does that mean? I believe this time around the entire tech sector will not be abandoned. If anything, there will be more conviction around the best businesses and business ideas.
This very same phenomenon is happening now in the banking sector. In the middle of the panic phase of the financial crisis, investors speak highly of BofA, JP Morgan, and US Bankcorp.
Amen to that!
Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-ti- mes-tou.html
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NGENIX, the first Russian nationwide Content Delivery Networ
Things are heating up in mother Russia!
No, please don’t panic. It’s not “that” kind of revolution which is taking place there now.
It’s another kind, a revolution which took the world by storm in the last decade and still continues today. Some countries entered in this revolution earlier, some later.
But the later ones sometimes are leading the pack and one of them is…yes, Russia!
Comscore released a study at in which states that Russia has the fastest growing Internet population from Europe. It grew by 27% in June, 2008 comparing with June, 2007 (over 17 million). The second place is taken by France (21%) and Spain (15%).
However, a local research foundation called Public Opinion Foundation shows that the total Internet users are around 32 million (spring 2008). An English version of that page is here: http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/projects/ocher- k/eint0702 (although it’s not updated with 2008 data yet).
At a population of over 141 million people that means that about 12% of that population goes online (about 22% according to Public Opinion Foundation). That’s the entire Romanian population and then some (for POF numbers).
Everything has to be scalable
Now, you know Russia is the largest country in the world when it comes to its territory. That puts pressure on its infrastructure, including IT infrastructure. Everything has to be big and more scalable.
NGENIX (use Google Translate for the English version) is the first Russian Content Delivery Network (CDN) to address the huge local market, according to Quintura blog.
NGENIX potential customers include media publishers, multimedia content providers and software distributors. So far, it opened points of presence in Moscow (their headquarters), Saint-Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok (see map).
They use UNIX-based solutions, Juniper M series routers and Gigabit switches Cisco Catalyst switches hardware. There’s no list of customers but since it just launched that’s understandable. Having a large territory and good Internet growth rate I’m assuming that more regional content delivery networks will enter the Russian market pretty soon. -
European conference alert: SHiFT and SOMESSO
Some bloggers complain about the conference season: supposedly there’s too much going on for them. I don’t really mind, actually I’m organizing one myself as well. I think most conferences not only facilitate knowledge sharing but also a place to meet incredibly interesting people. Therefore I regularly keep you posted about excited, somewhat unknown, conferences going on. Sure, there’s Web 2.0 Expo Berlin and Le Web, but had you already heard about Shift (Lisbon) and SOMESSO (Zurich)?
SHiFT - Lisbon - October 15 to 17
From organizer Bruno Pedro:
SHiFT is an International Tech Conference happening in sunny Lisbon, Portugal this October 15 to 17. This year’s edition is devoted to “Transient Technologies”, in the sense that technology is breaking up with its digital boundaries and it’s becoming a vital part of a lot of the things we do and interact with in our daily lives.
The conference itself is two days long but there will be an entire day devoted to free workshops on the day before.
As always, there’s an exciting speaker lineup but this year the conference is also open for session proposals.”
Discount code: There’s a 20 percent discount for Next Web readers like you. Register here and use promocode nextweb-b04e9349.
SOMESSO - Zurich - October 31
From organizer Arjen Strijker:
SOMESSO, the Corporate Social Media Conference is a series of recurring events organized throughout large cities in Europe where industry leaders, sales and marketing experts, agency new media specialists, Internet marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other financiers share their ideas about corporate social media and present their latest projects and discoveries.
This year, SOMESSO will be held October 31 at Papiersaal - Sihlcity in Zurich, Switzerland. Among the questions discussed at SOMESSO, participants will explore:- How is Social Media changing the way we do business?
- What Social Media tools should be used and which ones are a waste of time?
- How to start building short-term Corporate Social Media Strategy?
- The return of niche networks - what’s next? (Individualization, community forming)
- It’s a new ballgame - what Code of Conduct to apply when interacting with customers?
Discount code: There’s a 25 percent discount for Next Web readers like you. Register here and use promocode XYSO08CEJNEXTW. -
The antidote for the Financial Crisis; help a friend
The financial crisis becomes more and more pervasive and a lot of people have been hit hard by falling stocks. Everybody is facing tough economic times, but the people who have their money in stocks have even less reasons to smile.
Today is again a bearish day, indices are falling again (Amsterdam -5%, London -9%, Frankfurt -9%, Paris -5%, Brussels -5%).
In recognition of these bearish times, the Blog08 conference, organized by Ernst-Jan and Edial and cooperation with The Next Web, came up with a special financial crisis offer. Only today people who know people that have been hit by the crisis can buy one ticket and get their friend a free entrance pass. Help a friend!
Read on blog08 how to get it -
Friday Flashbacks: where do Seesmic, Jaiku and Mozilla Mobil
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
October 8, 2007 - Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.
October 9, 2007 - Google acquired Jaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it. As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.
October 10, 2007 - Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one. -
Fotki.com powers world’s giants with Photo Engines
There’s an almost unobserved but large scale Internet business being run from Estonia. It’s called Fotki. Happy tenth birthday to them!
Many people, especially from US, Canada and UK, but also Estonia, Lithuania and Iceland are familiar with the site Fotki.com. The founder Dmitri Don calls it photo-sharing, photo-printing, photo-selling and blogging website. I’d call it image-oriented social network. One that’s pretty good-looking.
Last year the site was recognized by CNET as one of the best Web 2.0 applications in the world, side by side with success stories like YouTube and MySpace.
Dmitri Don, who claims he never had to go to school to learn programming, says Fotki.com has more than half a million unique visitors and about 25+ million unique people who they serve images from their cluster. These are daily figures.
“We power the world”
But Fotki, as Don point out, is not just a website, but also web service. “We power the world, but nobody knows much about this!” Don says. The Estonian company is licensing photo-sharing software and providing hosting and storage services for digital content for huge global companies, with annual turnover over $50 billion.
One of them is Telecom Italia, the giant operator that’s active in seven European and Latin-American markets. Alice.it, its multifunctional web portal is powered by Fotki photo engine.
US clients
Another big guy Fotki serves is US retailer Sears, that operates more than 3800 shops. Sears’s home management and services portal ManageMyHome.com is run by Fotki’s photo engine. Don hurls names of US clients, one after the other - vacation organizer Mark Travel, media group Vegas.com, turism company Funjet.com etc.
Exceptional team in Estonia
Fotki was founded ten years ago in New York by Don and his wife Katrin Lilleoks (both pictured). By accident that was the exact same day some other guys founded Google! Fotki’s back-office and development team is in Estonia, Tallinn. This team is kind of exceptional, because it consists of 25 Russian-speaking Estonians, lead by Russian citizen Pavel Merdin.
“East Coast not a good place for Internet business”
This year Fotki moved its US office from New York to Silicon Valley. “The East Coast is not a good place for Internet business. People there don’t know much about the Internet. They ask stupid questions, like why do people want to upload their photos online?” Don claims.
An East Coast bank refused to open an account for Fotki in 2001. That’s because Don had said to the banker that he is running an Internet business. Don: “People from East Coast think that Internet business is porn, gambling, stealing and dirty money!”.
Fotki will raise some venture capital from Europe very soon. “Stay tuned!” says Don. -
The future of everyone’s apps…
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Top Tips for Tough Times from Tim Bray at FOWA
The Next Web talks with Tim Bray at Future of Web Apps, London. Tim gives us some tips for the tough times ahead. He knows that even if he’s wrong, we should listen.
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This is big: Wakoopa tracks web apps (but not YouPorn)
You’ve probably heard of Wakoopa before, it is one of those names that make you think… What??? WaWhat? But afterwards you’ll remember it. It gets more tough when you have to explain what they do. Up until now Wakoopa has been a popular tool for the more technical gifted among us (formerly known as nerds) who use the service to track their software usage and to discover new software and games. Now Wakoopa broadens its audience to all web savvies by tracking web apps.
Should you buy that pro account or not?
The trend of desktop software finding web equivalents has started some years ago, and really catched on the last couple of months. The “Cloud” has become Buzzword no.1. Therefore it’s the obvious move for Wakoopa.
Let’s take a closer look at what this means. First of all, you’ll get insight in your own usage of several services. Are you as much on Twitter as you say you are? Should you buy a Flickr pro account? What is the social network you use the most? Wakoopa knows.
Transparency in the web app market
But wait, there’s more! If Wakoopa is able to get a critical mass, it will reflect the pulse of all popular and unpopular web apps. Nowadays, VC’s, journalists, and bloggers depend on the press releases of startups and crappy Alexa ratings to get an idea of how popular a service is. Wakoopa could be the ultimate resource to discover new hot web apps (and the ones that are heading straight for the deadpool).
Recommendation Engine
Furthermore, Wakoopa is working on an improved version of their recommendation engine. They’ve hired two recommendation experts to get this done. According to founder Wouter Broekhof the engine is already in the testing phase. With the new data flowing in from web apps they will be able to give personalized recommendation on the use of your software, for desktop as well as web applications.
Are they tracking porn sites as well?
A friend of mine recently admitted to only use Safari to fulfill his online adult needs. He also uses Wakoopa…, you do the math. When I heard Wakoopa started tracking web apps, I realized privacy-related issues would become even more relevant. Especially since your Wakoopa profile page shows up high in the search results. How do we know Wakoopa doesn’t track sites or web apps we rather keep private?
Well, to ease your mind: Wakoopa Lead Developer Menno van der Sman told me Wakoopa only tracks tools that are mentioned in Crunchbase, and they filtered out sites like YouPorn.
Disclosure: Wakoopa is our sponsor