Facebook is going to go beyond rolling out standalone applications for iPhones, Google Android devices or feature phones and start considering itself a platform for developers to distribute mobile apps with.
“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy,” said Erick Tseng in his first public appearance since joining Facebook as head of mobile products. Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference today, he said the company will start building out this effort over the next several months [Source].
At first glance the three firms could not look more different.
DST was created in 2005 when two Russian internet investors, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, pooled their interests in mail.ru, a Russian web portal. Today the firm controls many of the country’s leading websites and boasts an interesting mix of owners, including Goldman Sachs and Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire, who holds 27%.
Based in Cape Town, Naspers is nearly 100 years old and is the publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper. But it is one of the most ambitious old-media companies anywhere in its move online. It still makes most of its sales—28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March—from print and pay-television, but it uses the cash to buy online firms.
Tencent hails from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Founded in 1998, it had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009 [Full article here].
Last year, Fast Company raised plenty of eyebrows by publishing a ranking on “Most Influential Women in Technology”. To compose an updated 2010 ranking it received an overwhelming number of nominees and fresh names proved that. Nonetheless, women in tech remain at a distinct disadvantage by almost any metric (average salary, top-management representation, etc). However, there is also plenty to celebrate and be inspired by. Fast Company categorised those woman into seven categories respectively:
Adapted from his book Engage, Brian Solis presents his list of suggestions to help businesses learn how to engage customers on Twitter through the examples of those companies, from Dell to Zappos, already successfully building online communities. You can find the complete article here. A summary of the top 10 tips are listed below:
1 ) Special Offers
2 ) Ordering
3 ) Word of Mouth Marketing
4 ) Conversation Marketing
5 ) Customer Service
6 ) Focus Groups
7 ) Direct Sales
8 ) Business Development
9 ) Curation
10) Information Networks
According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google’s lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook.
During the Winter holidays there were a few momentary spikes in traffic which placed Facebook on the top, but if you check out the graph of the long term trend shown above, you can see Facebook’s meteoric rise is now on target to meet or beat Google. And if that curve continues on its trajectory, which it may well do for a while (its market share is 185% up over the same week in 2009, for example,) Facebook will become number one by a huge margin, versus the tiddly little 0.04% separation it currently has above Google’s 7.03% share of average weekly market share.
Nonetheless, Facebook is now in a position to leverage those user visits to seize control of the online ad-placement business from Google–advertisers will begin to do the math and work out which site will get their ads in front of more eyeballs. And while Web 2.0 has been with us for a while, the fact that more people are visiting Facebook than Google indicates that this interactive revolution has really changed online habits [Source].
Popular photo-sharing social network Flickr was launched back in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company Ludicorp. It took one year for Yahoo to acquire Flickr, and among the company’s many acquisitions, Flickr definitely stands as one of the most successful.
Being six years old (nearly the same age as Facebook) makes Flickr almost an old guy on the Internet, as many other social networks (Bebo, hi5) have risen and fallen within that timespan. Although its traffic lately isn’t growing as it used to, it’s still doing well, with users sharing billions of photos there. We wish you a very happy birthday, Flickr!
Want to be the first to know what companies will be the next household name? BusinessWeek has started a section on its webpage that will keep track of promising start-ups that might see the limelight. Flip through the slide show for a look at all the profiles. You can also make a suggestion of a new company worth profiling and send it in to BusinessWeek.
Welcome to America’s Most Promising Startups, an ongoing series profiling new companies from across the country that embody the creativity and resiliency common among today’s entrepreneurs. Based on suggestions from our readers and staffers, we’ll be adding more profiles on a regular basis, so check back often. Our goal is to showcase promising companies before they become household names.
As the year draws to a close, what does 2010 hold for social media and the web? While web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are emerging.
Among the good bets for 2010 online: Real-time, Content Curation, Cloud Computing, Convergence Continues (eBooks are the exception), Social Gaming and more.
This week’s CNN column looks at 10 of the big themes that will shape the next year on the web.
We knew it was inevitable, and now it’s here: Google has just launched real-time search integrated into search results pages.
Basically it means that Google will display information from news sites, blogs and platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as soon as it is published. It works on mobile too, at least for now only @ iPhone and Android [Source].
Here’s a video demo from Google on real-time search:
Companies that create applications for Twitter are diversifying, preparing for a day when they may no longer be needed.
With a $1 billion valuation, plenty of money in the bank, and new deals with Google and Microsoft, Twitter could easily roll out applications to compete with its developers.
Google and Microsoft get the chance to mine the wealth of data—keywords, trends, links—rising and falling across Twitter in real time, a boon for both companies’ advertising networks. And Twitter’s 50 million users, who send messages that are up to 140 characters long, can now better monitor the company they’re keeping and tweet appropriately [Source].
Facebook is going to go beyond rolling out standalone applications for iPhones, Google Android devices or feature phones and start considering itself a platform for developers to distribute mobile apps with.
Want to be the first to know what companies will be the next household name? BusinessWeek has started a section on its webpage that will keep track of promising start-ups that might see the limelight. Flip through 
As the year draws to a close, what does 2010 hold for social media and the web? While web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are emerging.
We knew it was inevitable, and now it’s here: Google has just launched 
Companies that create applications for Twitter are diversifying, preparing for a day when they may no longer be needed. 
Recent Comments