7 posts tagged “networking”
We are very pleased to announce that Web Ascent Events, which will be a way to recognize the sprouting technology communities in places that aren't the Valley. Web Ascent is an independent event that I'm throwing in my home town. Our primary media sponsor is Mashable, so those attending and sponsoring are likely to get a lot of press, and see good things happen. And that's what we want!
There's a ton of great stuff coming out of the Valley, but there's a ton of great stuff coming from other corners of the nation. And that's who we're looking to highlight with Web Ascent Events. We're bringing out some great keynote speakers from the Valley and elsewhere, because we're looking to bring you as much value as possible, as presenters and guests.
So if you're interested in presenting or sponsoring, let us know! Shoot me an email at KristenNicole2@gmail.com.
There are lots more details coming up soon, so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to get the updates first.
Check back to Mashable as well. There will be news for Web Ascent Events there too!
Last night (when I started writing this post, TECH Cocktail was still "last night"), TECH Cocktail 4 was another big hit, this time at the Barleycorn's in Wrigleyville. The quarterly networking event here in Chicago just keeps getting bigger and better. Thrown by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, the companies that demoed were Menuism, text2store, timeXchange, ParkWhiz, Zaplee, and Interactive Mediums.
Menuism, I might add, managed to keep a strong lead from the ongoing text message votes from the attendees (provided by Interactive Mediums). I personally think it's because they got to demo at the rear bar...
There was also a dancing llama at TECH Cocktail, and if anyone should find the photo of me with the llama, let me know! I'd love to post some photos from the event. And all those wii fans out there would have had a blast, with the home run derby wii game stations that were set up for your playing pleasure.
In all, TECH Cocktail 4 was a great time. I met a lot of great people, and even got to keep a few balloons. That's what I call a party.
Check here for additional coverage of TECH Cocktail 4.
Check here for interviews 606tech has had with the Chicago Startups that demoed at TECH Cocktail 4.
See here for more photos of the dancing llama.
Thanks for the pictures, Frank.
With
the extreme popularity of Twitter, and the talk of how it should be
acquired soon, it only makes sense that similar services emerge and
gain traction as well. Jaiku is Twitter's most relevant rival, and I can clearly see why. I first mentioned Jaiku here,
as an offering to those looking for a Twitter alternative. My favorite
aspect of Jaiku is the ease with which any feed can be added to your
account, for your own purposes as well as your friends'. And with
Jaiku's growing buzz in the blogosphere, I'm happy to have had a chance
to catch up with Jaiku's co-founder Jyri Engestrom .
How did Jaiku come about?
In 2006 the two founders - Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen -realized we both wanted a better way to share what we were doing in real life with our friends online. Although we spent a lot of time on blogs and Web services built by our friends, like Flickr, we felt they were too cumbersome to update and difficult to read on our mobile phones. We decided to make a service that regular people would use every day, that was quicker to update on the go and would enable all of us to see what our family members, friends, and colleagues were doing simply by glancing at our handset.
Last summer we met Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa, two talented mobile developers who shared our passion to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence on phones. Mika had already written pretty ingenious code for Symbian phones, that solved some the hardest technical problems related to always-on client-server communication (such as power consumption) as part of his PhD studies. Teemu was one of the key developers in Nokia's Core Applications team, where he had written parts of the Calendar and other core Nokia applications. With Mika and Teemu on board, we decided to build a mobile client and a Jabber back-end for Jaiku.
Later in 2006, we raised seed funding and hired two great Web developers: Andy Smith from Flock, and Juha Törönen, who joined us from the leading Helsinki Web design company. With Andy and Juha we started developing the Web components, support for text messaging, and the ability to embed RSS feeds from other services to your stream of Jaikus. We put an early beta version out quietly last year, and formally launched Jaiku at the O'Reilly ETel conference in March this year.
Where
do you see online behavioral trends going, considering your service
really allows for the constant updating of user behavior?
We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them.
Just as a recap, the posts on Jaiku are simply called Jaikus. They are shorter than blog posts. Because their content is usually about what you're doing, how you're feeling, or where you're going right now, their value typically also degrades more quickly over time. On many Web services the interval between new updates from a user is a day or more, but on Jaiku the updates are more frequent. When you browse the profiles of Jaiku members, you'll notice that a Jaiku that was posted an hour ago can already be outdated by several newer ones. The content of Jaikus is also often more personal than on blogs. Although many share their Jaikus publicly, a lot of people prefer to share them privately with their friends.
Oh, and a short digression on the name: We came up with the name Jaiku because the posts on Jaiku resemble Japanese haikus. A haiku is a short poem about the moment that a person is living through even as they are writing it down. In Finland too the nomadic Lapp people share stories by singing Joikus. We liked the name Jaiku mainly because it had a fun sound to it. Those who want can also read in it a little reminder that actually the need we're addressing isn't anything new. The basic desire to tell others what you're up to, and have a sense of what they're doing, has been around forever and in all cultures.
Jaiku can really be seen as an aggregator as well as a distributor of personal information. What are the main directives you were aiming for with Jaiku?
Our general aim is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence (what they're doing, how they're feeling, where they're going). Jyri calls this social peripheral vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss. Even just the simple knowledge that your loved ones are ok can have a lot of emotional value in an increasingly unstable world.
We think our key discovery has been to find an interaction model for posting and commenting across different channels. Jaiku posts can include embedded media like icons and photos. The service supports threaded conversation, and works smoothly from Web, to IM, to SMS, and clients. It integrates automatic updates like changes in your location, availability, etc. from the phone with Web feeds and manually posted Jaikus.
Our accomplishment especially on the mobile has been to bring the contact list to life. Presence information can be used to turn static, "dead" contact lists into dynamic, live ones. Some of our users have remarked that Jaiku Mobile makes the traditional S60 phone book obsolete. Once you start using live contact list and seeing what your friends are up to, it can feel pretty lame to return to using a standard phone. It's exciting to imagine how presence information from Jaiku would enrich other Web services and desktop applications.
How is communication facilitated between users? Can you get a feed of someone else's Jaikus, or even a feed of your own Jaikus?
You can get feeds of your own and other people's Jaikus in RSS and Atom format, or using our APIs. In a few weeks, you can also use your IM client t follow your Jaiku contacts and post new Jaikus.
Also, the next release of Jaiku Mobile for both S60 and Java phones will display the Jaikus from your contacts and support commenting. Commenting has become a central part of the service, so making that work smoothly across all clients is very important to us at the moment.
You've recently introduced your beta version for the Nokia S60. How's that going so far?
Starting with S60 was a conscious decision for us. It was the best platform for developing an application that enabled people to share their presence from their phone on the Web. There are over 100 million Nokia S60 handsets out there, and we knew we could do something that most people though was impossible. We're now working on a Java version that is compatible with a lot more handsets. It is currently in private beta.
That said, our interest is not to monopolize the clients. Rather, our vision from the start has been to use open protocols like Jabber and develop APIs so it'll be easy for other people to write clients and connect their own Web services to Jaiku. Large chuncks of the S60 client have been open-source and we're going to continue contributing to relevant open source projects. We think it'd be cool if in the future people could also write their own visualizations etc. for mobile handsets in e.g. Flash or Python using our client APIs.
Did you have to break a deal with Nokia in order to create this beta version?
Jaiku Mobile does not rely on any proprietary Nokia APIs - the nice part about Symbian and S60 is that it's much more open than just about any other major mobile platform. Aside from that, Nokia has shown a lot of positive interest in what we're doing, and we try to keep in as close touch as possible with our contacts there. One of our developers, Mika, was recently appointed a "Forum Nokia Champion" due to his pioneering work in building the Symbian development community. Quite a few Nokia employees are Jaiku users, and their feedback has been invaluable to us.
What complications did you have in creating a mobile application for Jaiku?
Making a back-end that can support mobile clients is a lot more complex than building your average Web site. It makes developing some features slower, but it's also a competitive advantage because we've solved some pretty hard problems that enable efficient client-server communication. On the S60 side, porting for S60 3rd Edition took longer than we expected. We found quite a few bugs in the S60 platform and had to work our way around those.
What's next for Jaiku?
The next step is to open a developer section with documentation on how to use our APIs, so the independent developers who are working Jaiku desktop clients, making mashups, and developing mobile clients for other platforms get better support. This will be released by early April.
In addition to the APIs we plan to introduce a bunch of new features in the next couple of months. These include connectivity to existing IM services, a Java client, and support for groups. We've also been experimenting with media sharing and SMS notifications. Once the basic feature set is ready, we plan to start working with our local user communities to offer versions of Jaiku in different languages. We'll also be working to improve our integration with the coolest other online services.
So tell me what Fashionising is all about? Fashionising
is a social network built for people who love fashion and buy it, and
those who love it so much that they work within the fashion industry.
We’re particularly focused on creating a community that supports
upcoming talent in the industry, including models and designers. You mention that social networking isn't just about making friends anymore. What else is social networking for? MySpace’s
focus on music, and the success of members such as Lily Allen and the
Arctic Monkeys, really proved that social networks can be a driving
force in our world. Instead of just talking to random people, they can
become an area where people can create opportunities for themselves.
For Fashionising, it’s about opportunities in the fashion world. It
might be something as simple as front row seats at a fashion show, or
something much larger such as providing a struggling, but hugely
talented designer, with the opportunity to find a consumer base which
would otherwise be closed off to them. How do you bring the added value to social networking? Unlike
most social networks, we’ve approached Fashionising from the content
side of things. Profiles and messaging systems, which usually are the
main focus, aren’t our major focus. Instead we’ve concentrated on tools
and features such as our Fashion Diary, which is a mashup of street
style and fashion show videos and photos from across the net, and one
main blog, which all members can contribute to as opposed to giving
each member their own blog. We develop content laden features, which we
then ‘plug’ the membership base into, allowing them to contribute,
comment, and collaborate. It’s more-or-less a reverse of the model of
social networks, but we believe it’s where longevity and value really
exists. In a way, you're providing a lifestyle network. How does that come into play for users' interaction within the site? One
of the most interesting effects is the way members represent
themselves. They’re amongst peers, and trying to show that they have a
lifestyle on par with others, or one that we should be envious of. As a
result, people are much more aware of how they represent themselves.
It’s nearly always with pride, dignity and respect because they feel
that they personally are on show and that their name is tied to their
actions. It’s the sort of ‘ownership of actions’ that exists in the
real world, but isn’t always on display on the internet. How does that come into play for other aspects of life, such as jobs, etc? We
hope we’ve made a positive change to many of our members lives. I know
one member describes himself as having going from ‘fashion faux pas to
fashionista’. That’s something that we’re proud of. What are your goals with Fashionising? To
build a vibrant fashion centric community, and to help the industry
change in a positive way. Working within the fashion industry you
notice there is a lot of resistance to change, and many a person has
told us that they either don’t understand, or don’t want to understand,
fashion on the internet. If they keep that mind set, they’re going to
end up in the same place where a large part of the music industry
currently finds itself – the consumer has moved years beyond where the
major players think they are. We don’t want that to be the case for
fashion. What are the next steps for Fashionising? We’re
going to continue to focus on providing opportunities for people within
the industry be they upcoming or established, and at present we’re
building a portfolio platform for stylists, models and photographers.
We’re hoping to have this completed by our official April launch, but
beyond that we’re going to continually add to the site and refine what
is already there. Aside from tools to help the industry,
we’re looking to build tools for more fashion and lifestyle content.
This will help expand our audience, and give the people we’re trying to
help a reach previously restricted to those lucky enough to be featured
in the likes of Vogue.
With
the recognition and success of niche social networks, Fashionising
looks to make their mark on an overall segment of culture.
Fashionising is dedicated to the people that love fashion, and is
looking to offer more than simple conduits for conversing online, but
tools for effective networking within the industry. Fashionising wants
to spur opportunities for its users and bring a higher level of purpose
to the manifestation of our online behavior. Building on the basics of
social networking, in order to bring about a lifestyle network.
I recently got a chance to hear from Fashionising's Daniel P. Dykes.
They key to it all is
the quality behind what goes on. Whether it’s in our members
interaction, or the opportunities we provide them, quality is key.
by Kristen Nicole
Bud.TV is among the few professionally produced, branded niche sites that hasn't gone over too well.
Considering the general appeal of Anheuser-Busch's marketing tactics,
and a well-received ad campaign for this year's Super Bowl, the site's
traffic has taken a nose dive, and there is much confusion as to why
that is. Bud.TV has added premium content from its partnerships with
companies such as Sony, and provides a fairly wide array of things to
do on the site. Nevertheless, their projections of gaining 2-3 million users this year is looking like a dismal dream.
...
My opinion on why Bud.TV just isn't working out:
...
Registration Page
...
This
is the first page you encounter when you attempt to enter Bud.TV's
site, and even for those that are of age, verification errors occur.
The simple fact that you must register an account, entering in personal
data before being able to even browse through their features is a major
turn off. To many, it simply isn't worth it.
...
Lack of user-driven content
...
While
UGC is incorporated into Bud.TV's site, their focus is the premium
content. In order for a niche site to succeed, there needs to be a
high level of user integration. If a user cannot participate, there's
little reason to stay on the site. Anheuser-Busch's funding has gone
to the provision of this premium content, leaving little room in other
budgets, such as paid search and prizes.
...
No Incentives
...
Another
main reason for the success of a branded niche site is the opportunity
to win prizes. This keeps users coming back to the site, participating
in repeat activity, and encourages them to self-promote, bringing
traffic and more users to the site. If Bud.TV doesn't invest in
granting users an incentive to return, then they just won't.
...
No Paid Search
...
If
you create a site, you have to let people know you're around.
Anheuser-Busch simply can't rely on their Super Bowl ad to boost
traffic to the site for the remainder of the year. When you have a
company as established as Anheuser-Busch, you expect them to be able to
throw a little money into marketing the site, especially if the site's
main goal is for branding purposes.
iVillage,
owned by NBC, has launched their social network, iVillage Connect. The
social components that have been incorporated into the iVillage
platform are pretty useful, and they've done well to support external
widgets. Though their demographic isn't the largest in terms of widget
use, sites like iVillage have proven transitional in overall Internet
behavior when it comes to the trickle-down effect of early adopters,
teenagers, and the rest of the world. 
That
being said, perhaps it is because of this that it took iVillage so long
to launch a social network. iVillage was extremely social by nature,
and its origins, long before having been scooped up by NBC was a
bulletin board for users at its core. iVillage is somewhat niche and
has always aimed to keep up with the general trends. Considering its
ever-growing popularity, the addition of a social network can do
nothing but good for their business.
via
USA Today has launched several social networking applications to their online component, allowing users to create blogs, add comments and vote (thumbs up or down) for articles, and send private messages to each other. This is a nice step in the right direction for the old media company looking to increase their online presence.
But Steve O'Hear of ZDNet brings up a very nice point: what value do these features add for the end user? Some devoted readers of USA Today are simply uncomfortable with the changes made to their website. And many of the social networking features are not incentivized in the way that would garner true user participation.
This raises the important question of why USA Today has undergone this revamping of their site. To please investors or to increase their readership base by going after the early adopters that may utilize their latest features?
I should hope it's the latter, though the former is extremely important as well. Their core readership is accustomed to a certain style of media publications as well as a certain format for online applications. There is an overall hesitance towards learning new behavior, especially on the internet, but adding social networking features is clearly going after a particular audience.
Creating a separate niche network or including a white label service for peripheral features seems to work just as well, if not better than, in terms of gaining subscribers and user-generated content. That which is contributed by the community is often regarded as applicable to the average person, giving it weight that an expert can't fabricate. If old media companies can apply certain aspects of their websites to this phenomenon, whether it be fully integrated in their service or allowed to flourish on a separate site, then that's what they should be after.
