TechScape

Creative Imagination asks if the Web 2.0 bubble is close to bursting already, or whether some of the companies that are failing (citing Filmloop and Jobster) just got into the game too late with nothing innovative to add.

Online Marketing Blog has an interview with Amanda Watlington about getting involved with search marketing, her appreciation for being hands on with the work, her thoughts on marketing via Second Life, the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification program, tips on business blogging and the power of networking.

LinkedIn is a social network that is supposed to bring you closer to the sort of people that can progress your career, social standing, prospects, and general life, but which has come under significant fire for (in layman's terms) being a waste of time. Akkam's Razor writes on how to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Mashable reports that MySpace France came out of beta testing yesterday: "The significance of MySpace France is that it competes against Skyblog, the undisputed champion of the French blogging scene. Skyblog is owned by French radio station Skyrock, and has its own plans to expand across Europe and even launch a US version. The question is whether MySpace, which had 1.3 million uniques in France in November compared to 7 million unique visitors to Skyblog, can make any progress there."

TechCrunch asks whether older people really need their own set of web 2.0 sites, as another site for over 50s - a search engine called Cranky - launches.

While at CES last week, I caught up with Mark Heinrich, chief technology officer and co-founder of Phanfare. It's an online photo and video sharing service that stands out through its use of a subscription model, charging $54.95 a year.

"We have the audacity to charge our customers money!" he told me. "That's why we call them customers, and not users. And because there's no advertising, we don't turn your private photo albums into some kind of billboard for adverts or print-ordering services."

Phanfare started in January 2005, and now has over 5,000 users, 80% of which pay the annual subscription fee (as opposed to the monthly or lifetime options that are available). And Heinrich has strong views on the prospects - or lack of - for Phanfare's free competition.

A survey from RarePlay claims that just 8% of the top 1,000 US brands have websites that are compatible with mobile web browsers, taking into account their limited bandwidth and small screens.

The industries that score best include Internet & ISPs (23%), travel (18%) and entertainment (17%), with sectors like pharmaceutical, retail and education scoring less than 1%. RarePlay – which it has to be said earns its money from making web applications for firms which ARE cross-platform – cites BMW, Red Bull and T.G.I. Friday's as three brands that have commissioned mobile-friendly sites.

Widgets are becoming very popular at the moment, and the latest startup to take advantage of them is Leafletter which allows anyone to make Flash widgets (or "little websites" as they describe them) Joe Anderson at Webby's World describes the service.

Coming soon (apparently) is an online help document generator called Helphee. At present it's pre-launch, and they're collecting email addresses to notify people when they launch (I've seen that before). Their tag line at present is "author and publish help documents online in 5 minutes or less". I don't think anyone will be authoring Vista manuals on this, but it sounds interesting. We'll keep you posted...

Sidekiq is another interestingly-named search engine that will search through a whole range of different types of media and individual engines. It all sounds very promising, though compared to Google it seems over-complicated. Whether it will catch on remains to be seen - search is a very crowded area of the web.

Markus Frind CEO of Plentyoffish.com reports that Venturebeat has recorded some numbers on social networking site Facebook:

• 6 Billion pageviews a month

• $700,000 a month in revenue in December
• $410,000 loss in December.
• 16 million unique users a month.

Zpeech is another chat-about-this-website service. They're a nice touch, but the fact there are a number of these services about means that any interesting commentary gets dispersed. If the original site allows its own comments, it can also be cut out of the loop because 'eternalised' comments made on Zpeech are stored on that service.

And whilst we're on the 'more of the same' vein, Shuzak is a 'social network for geeks' that could already be fulfilled by Digg or even Slashdot (oh, sorry, that's "news for nerds").

Blinkx has branched out again and now has a large collection of sports videos courtesy of its new partnership with online sports broadcaster NBX. Blinkx may not be YouTube in terms of popularity, but it's building a nice service that doesn't seem to be quite so bogged down with "my mate just fell over" videos.

That's real-world shopping, I mean. Digital agency IconNicholson has unveiled a concept it calls "social retailing", in a press release that impressively shoehorns in Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Near Field Communication AND Web 2.0.

The concept is being shown off at this week's National Retail Federation show in New York. It's basically a shop that lets The Kids interact using text messaging, IM and email as they browse the frocks (which for the show have been supplied by fashion designer Nanette Lepore). It also includes NFC technology to monitor stock and make the checkout process more secure.

Following last week's iPhone announcement, mobile phone operators have been falling over themselves to improve their mobile internet services, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. The latest such development stems from the partnership between 3 Group and Yahoo!, who joined forces in June 2006, and will now work together to provide 3 Group customers in Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and the UK with Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0. Irish 3 Group customers will also get access to Yahoo! Search.

The Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 services on offer will include Yahoo! Go 2.0, “an innovative new application that redefines the mobile Internet experience for consumers through a unique product design, ability to personalize with content from the entire Internet and a reinvention of mobile search”, Yahoo! oneSearch, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Messenger.

The collaboration is not set to end with Europe, however - 3 Group is also looking to expand its existing services within Asia and Australia.

There's not enough cutting edge web/mobile development focused around The Booze, so I'm quite interested in the news that WineZap.com has launched a mobile site that lets you check wine prices and availability in real time - even if it is US-only for the moment.

The site has you enter a vintage and wine name, and are then shown pricing info and contact details for retailers selling it. You can narrow that down by postcode too, and certain handsets will be able to call the retailer by clicking on a link. The theory is that people will use the app while shopping for wine, to check if they're getting a good price - and if not, where they can get a better one.

True mobile 2.0 is here at last, or so say Juice Wireless. The authors of JuiceCaster 4.0 claim that their baby is the first application which will allow users to create and share rich media between mobile phones and the internet, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. In addition to the expected shared and accessible content, JuiceCaster 4.0 will allow real-time distribution of pictures and videos.

Media can be created using either mobile phones or computers, and can then be shared with a range of devices, and is compatible with the majority of cameraphones available in the UK, the US, Finland, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain.

Juicecaster 4.0 is free via the JuiceCaster website, and registration includes a MediaBox, an internet storage device which automatically stores pictures and videos taken with your chosen mobile device. Furthering the whole community social-networking web 2.0 ethos is the MediaBox's shareability: content is easily shared with Xanga, MySpace, Friendster, and Blogger, among other sites. Similar to YouTube, the JuiceCaster MediaBox also features channels for other users to subscribe to; channel content can be displayed on mobile phones, iPods, and computers.

It was a busy week at CES for Yahoo, which made a bunch of announcements. Among them was news of a new mobile search service called oneSearch, which is currently part of Yahoo's beta Go for Mobile 2.0 application, but will be introduced to its mobile web and SMS services by the end of January.

"Today's mobile search is horribly terribly broken," says Ojas Rege, senior director of mobile products at Yahoo, who I caught up with at the show.

"What happens so often is that companies take things that work on the PC and bring them to the mobile phone. So what works on a PC, when I enter a search term and want a bunch of links back to do research, doesn't work on a mobile phone. Those links break, or take me to sites that don't work very well, which take 10 seconds to reach."

While 3G has been occupying the majority of non-iPhone mobile news, 2.5G handsets have been silently improving, with ROK's push to deliver TV services to the phones, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. In addition to the existing ROK TV and FreeBe services currently available to 2.5G handsets in the UK, the US, Turkey, China, and Thailand, ROK has launched 'Monkey Sports News', a live sports news channel.

What's newsworthy about Monkey Sports News, however, is the way it's put together. ROK combined speech recognition software with a live text feed of sports news, creating a channel where the news is 'read' by CG animals. The technology is patent-pending, and uses mass-market 2.5G GPRS to stream video.

Frequent travellers on UK operator 3 will be cheering today's news that the network is slashing its roaming charges if they're in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Hong Kong or Australia (all of which are countries where 3 has a local operator too).

Of course, it's no consolation to anyone who's getting stung while roaming on other networks. And having spent the last week in Las Vegas trying desperately hard not to think about how much every call / text / data surf was costing me, I think further roaming cuts are going to be essential if Mobile 2.0 services are going to take off.

If you're interested in mobile data strategies and have a few grand burning a hole in your pocket, you could do worse than to invest in a copy of Portio Research's "Strategies for Creating End-User Demand for Mobile Data Services". The 160-page PDF will set you back £1,495 for a licence that covers up to five people, £1,995 for a licence that extends to medium-sized companies, or £2,995 for a corporate licence. All prices exclude VAT, which puts them out of reach of the average home user.

According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, the report covers ways in which mobile operators can increase their revenues from data services, and examines "mobile portals, mobile music downloads, mobile video downloads (and uploads), ringback tones, mobile commerce, mobile games, mobile video calling, SMS and MMS, plus a section looking at Web 2.0."

In addition to services offered, Portio examines market conditions in specific country markets around the world, and highlights "industry-leading examples" from the UK, the US, and a number of those lucky, lucky Asian countries whose mobile countries are light years ahead of our own, especially Japan and South Korea, where I would not be surprised to discover phones capable of independent space travel.

For a free overview brochure of the report, click here.

Another interesting partnership from CES was Nokia and Six Apart, after the handset maker agreed to preload SA's Vox Mobile application on its new N93i handset, and other Nseries phones going forward.

As a hardened Vox user, this is good news, but it makes me wonder what Nokia's approach to moblogging is from now on. Does this mean its focus has shifted away from its own Lifeblog application? Or will Nokia sign similar deals with other blogging companies, to have a suite of applications sitting on its handsets when users get them out of the box?

I'm a big fan of Vox Mobile, and the demo I saw of it running on the N93i last week was slick and effective. It'll be interesting to see how other blogging firms and handset manufacturers roll out similar partnerships in the coming months - Sony Ericsson already tied up with Blogger last year, but hasn't shouted about it much since then.

Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have taken the wraps off their new venture, which was codenamed The Venice Project, but is now called... Joost. Well, I guess the domain name was available. So what is it? An internet TV venture that the duo says combines the best of TV with Web 2.0-style choice, control and flexibility.

At its core, it's pretty TV-like, with programmes, channels and ads - the latter is presumably where the revenues are going to come from. Around that is full-featured search functionality and social networking features including chat. It's PC-only at the moment, although Mac and Linux versions are in development.

Bit late on this one, but if you were wondering what TechCrunch UK's Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher would do next after the messy demise of that blog, well, you don't have to wait any more. The pair have popped up at Vecosys, whose strapline is "Tracking Europe's Tech Venture Ecosystem". It's sure to be required reading for anyone wanting a European slant on this whole Web 2.0 malarkey.

Fascinating post over at The Next Net about how we'll be seeing a helluva lot more Web widgets in 2007:

"The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web."

Writer Erick Schonfeld also makes the point that widgets could herald the death of the page view as a measure of site popularity. Will advertisers be demanding to know site-owners' widget rating instead? Which should at least be entertaining if Jonathan Ross ever presents any new media industry awards...

Amid all that talk about brands getting involved with Second Life, nobody mentioned the idea of brands cutting out the middleman and creating their own virtual worlds. But MTV has gone and done it, albeit for a single show, The Hills, and in partnership with Makena Technologies.

Virtual Hills is a virtual online extension of the show, and follows the same pairing's experiment last year with Virtual Laguna Beach, based on another MTV show. Virtual Hills replicates the show's locations, and will apparently run a series of special events, including fashion challenges, concerts and dance challenges, and a nightclub.

Mobile social networking on both sides of the pond is dominated by MySpace and Windows Live Spaces, new research from Telephia has found. Brits uploading mobile phone content onto the web are most likely to use MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, and YouTube, while in America YouTube is replaced with the college students' favourite, Facebook.

Telephia's statistics, reported by Mobile Marketing Magazine, shows that 21% of British mobile social networkers are devoted to MySpace, 18% are enamoured with Windows Live Spaces, 9% are dedicated YouTubers, and a further 9% love Bebo. While PCs are still used to upload media onto the internet, Telephia points to the recent rise in mobile social networking as a sign that 2007 will be the year in which the medium begins to benefit from its staggering growth potential.

The majority of mobile social networkers are in their teens and early twenties, with twice as many UK mobile social networkers coming from the 15-17 age group as from the population as a whole.

In the US MySpace has effectively cornered the market in mobile social networking in the 15-17 market, with 69% of that age group using it as their primary host of photos and videos. Mobile social networkers as a whole also prefer to use MySpace, which was the top choice of 32% of mobile social networkers. Facebook has a 13% share, and Windows Live Spaces 11%.

Tony Hung has written an interesting post about articles getting buried on Digg, reflecting on the 'black box' that determines how easy it is for a group of people to bury articles or even entire sites:

"Digg needs to have its population police its own content, because it doesn’t have the manpower (two guys at last count) to try and do it themselves. This leaves room for enormous abuse, as individuals can bury stories with abandon and get entire domains banned with little recourse to getting them reinstated, since the a large part of the process is automated.

The future of digital advertising? It's social video sharing, standing around waving at billboards, and separating buyers from time-wasters online. Maybe. At least, that's one of the new technologies on view at Microsoft's Demo Fest, where the company's adCenter Labs division is showing off its latest concepts.

Social video sharing lets users highlight and comment on a specific area of a video frame, using Javascript, while also tying in with users' Windows Live ID if they only want to view comments from their friends. I'm slightly unclear about how this helps advertisers, but do like Microsoft's example of "being able to discuss how a goalie just blocked a soccer goal". Love that soccerball...

Podfitness claims to be the world's first "customised audio personal training service", and I won't argue with it. It's a service that creates personalised podcasts, with exercise instructions given by over 80 personal trainers, mixed with your own tunes and then downloaded onto your iPod or MP3 player.

It costs $19.99 a month, and has just revamped its service, adding a new Dashboard and easier user interface, making workouts more customised, adding Calendar and Journal features, and providing a Trainer matching system to suggest trainers and programs that match your fitness profile (I wonder if there's an 'unfit kebab muncher' profile...)

Mobile firm Hands On Mobile has signed a deal with 3H Group, to bring the latter's MeeGos avatars to mobile. They're the animated graphics that can be used within Windows Live Messenger IM conversations, and are used by over 24 million people (just under 9% of the total Messenger users).

What I want to know is how they'll be used in mobile. Hands On says it'll develop a "broad range" of MeeGos mobile products, encompassing "games, personalisation and lifestyle". Which hopefully means something more ambitious than just wallpapers and animated ringtones.

Really good post over on the Guardian's Organ Grinder blog reporting on an event at the Association of Online Publishers focusing on building communities around content. Suzie Daniels, head of business media at CNET Networks, talked about their approach to user-generated content.

"We want to enable those thought-leading people to engage with the site and give them a platform equal with our editorial team," she said. "And if we can get our thought leaders to contribute, the lurkers will benefit more."

Eager to see what News Corp has planned next in the Web 2.0 world? Rupert Murdoch is one of the keynote interviews at next month's 2007 Media Summit in New York, where he'll be fielding questions from BusinessWeek's Stephen Adler.

What questions would you like to ask Rupe? I'd be keen to know if he ever considered buying YouTube, how MySpace could interact more with News Corp's various media properties, and whether he'll give me several million quid for the vague idea for a Web 2.0 service that I sketched on the back of a napkin last night (sorry, can't say more, it's pre-Alpha...)

That interview's on February 8th, but the previous day, Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp and Expedia will be doing a similar Q&A session. It's a formiddable pairing, although wouldn't it be more fun if the two media moguls had to interview each other? Just a thought.

At least, that's the conclusion to be drawn from this Telecoms.com story claiming that since Virgin Mobile launched its mobile TV service last October, less than 7,000 subscribers have signed up.

It currently offers live streams of BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, E4, ITN News and 50 digital radio stations, which are all received using DAB rather than a 3G network. So is this curtains for mobile TV? I don't think so, but if the figures are true, there are certainly some conclusions to be drawn.

Hurrah for January, the time when experts everywhere can make their predictions for the year ahead, safe in the knowledge that in 12 months time, they'll have been forgotten, ready for the next round of futuregazing.

Deloitte's Technology, Media and Telecoms industry group has just unveiled its predictions for 2007. The most relevant (to this blog at least) are:

The evolution of social networking. Including improvements in identification, and making it quicker and easier for services to remove copyrighted material quickly. I'm wondering if 2007 could also some lawsuits being flung around in this area, likely aimed at the few user-generated content services that are actually making money.

Interesting news in today's FT of a deal between internet TV firm Veoh and Hollywood talent agency United Talent Agency to set up an online TV channel to discover new talent. Apparently the deal was brokered by former Disney exec Michael Eisner, one of the major stakeholders in Veoh.

Veoh's CEO Danny Shapiro has described the new channel as "the new gateway for talent discovery in Hollywood", although Veoh will also be selling advertising around the channel.

In theory, UGC sites like Veoh are good proving grounds for new talent, although it remains to be seen if the videos that are popular among users translate well to movies. The proof will come if, in 12-18 months time, UTA has signed up anyone via Veoh, and put them on the big screen.

(via FT.com)

Many people believe 2007 will be the year when social networks and video-sharing sites start to splinter into niche services aimed at specific demographic groups, split by age, gender, nationality or interests.

Early evidence comes with the launch of DayZ Loop, which claims to be an "online infotainment television network" aimed at teenage girls (specifically, 13 to 17 year-olds). The site's aiming to attract users with a mix of video content, social networking, workshops and editorial content.

What are the most popular online videos on any given day? You could try and work it out by tracking viewing figures across the many video-sharing sites. Or you could let someone else do it for you.

That someone else appears to be Vidmeter, which has software recording the number of views and comments every hour on the top listed videos on *deep breath* Atom Films, Break.com, Daily Motion, Google, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube.

The iPod might be a (theoretically) closed system in terms of application development, but it's always been open in terms of the content you put on it. After all, your entire collection of CDs and digital photos can happily sit on there. But there hasn't been much talk about putting other people's multimedia gubbins on it.

A friend just sent me a link to Mogopop, which claims to make that easier. The idea is you upload your photos, video clips, music and text, and then they're combined into a single file, which other users can then download.

Yesterday, I wrote about the launch of DayZ Loop, an online TV network aimed at teenage girls. I had a couple of questions: one about how advertising would work on the community, and also over whether its focus on 'infotainment' would appeal to a wide base of users.

Renee Steiger, creator of strategic alliances at the company, got in touch today with some more info on both of those. Let's start with the latter point.

"Believe it or not, our teen girl members - as well as some other recent market studies - show that girls get tired of the 'in your face' aspect of some other sites," she says. "Also, they often feel uncomfortable with being approached by strangers who may have ulterior motives."

It can't be easy launching a new photo-sharing site. After all, once you've uploaded hundreds of your pics to one place online, it's a real faff when you then have to upload them all again if you switch loyalties to another service.

Nevertheless, plenty of firms want Flickr's crown, and the latest is Pikeo, which has been launched by Orange. As you'd expect, mobile is strongly tied in, with the site providing a link to the ShoZu mobile application, which allows users to upload photos directly from their phones.

Presumably, Orange will be preloading the app on handsets sold through its retail stores if the community takes off.

Can virtual mobile phones give your avatar brain cancer? Just a thought (albeit a silly one). It was provoked by the news that Vodafone is launching a mobile network within Second Life, with virtual handsets that will let users call each other within the world, and send texts.

Vodafone is launching a 'Vodafone Island' next month in Second Life, so presumably users will be able to head there to pick up the handsets, although there's no details on how much (if anything) users will pay to use the virtual phones. Is it too cynical to predict enormous roaming charges if you want to 'roam' and call someone in the real world?

As more and more companies enter the emerging Mobile 2.0 space (I'm not sure if that term has caught on yet, or if someone can sue my arse for using it...) there's a pressing need for categorisation, to make it easier to figure out who's doing what, how they're doing it, and why they think it'll be bought by Google change the world.

Well, kudos to Rudy De Waele, who's created a wiki space for Mobile 2.0 companies. You can find it here, and there's already a bunch of pages up and running there. He's hoping companies will keep the site updated with news, pitches, presentations etc.

(via m-trends)

Forget short films. South African film-maker Aryan Kaganof has made a full-length flick using just a pair of Sony Ericsson W900i phones. It's called SMS Sugar Man, and is due out in May, when it'll be distributed in cinemas, but also on DVD, over the internet and, yes, on mobile phones.

The distribution is the interesting thing for me here. It's unclear how involved Sony Ericsson was with the project – a trailer for SMS Sugar Man will be preloaded on the W900i when it actually goes on sale in South Africa, which implies they had a hand in it.