UK Telcos plan moves into Social Networking

By Vivek Puri | September 30th, 2006 at 05:32 pm ET         

 UK telcos are feeling left behind in the social networking buildup dominated by web startups like MySpace, Bebo, Tagworld. O2 in UK is trying to cover up and is in talks with Bebo to offer the social networking site on its mobile phones. Bebo is one of the most visited social networking sites in UK. According to research results of Hitwise in August, Bebo’s market share of visits in UK was 12.91%. In related news, Vodafone will also be launching its own social networking site next month having features similar to MySpace.
 
In the meantime MySpace is also gearing up for launch of MySpace on mobile. Currently only Helio users have access to MySpace on mobile but MySpace is in talks with other major carriers to launch its service on mobile.
 
Social networking on mobile will be much bigger than $15 billion estimates for MySpace. Mobile nets will also play out well for Telcos especially in Asian countries who have experienced the fastest mobile phone growth. From the feature perspective, a product like Joopz has much more potential instead of imitating MySpace on mobile. Joopz effectively bridges the gap between web and mobile world, which hasn’t been addressed till now. Still it is too early to say what MySpace, O2, and Vodafone have to offer.

Eluma is DEMOgod for DEMOfall ‘06

By Vivek Puri | September 29th, 2006 at 01:43 pm ET         

Eluma, developer of brandable desktop community application, has won the DEMOgod award for DEMOfall ‘06. Eluma was one of eight winners, selected from the 67 demonstrators at DEMOfall. I had written about Eluma earlier this week.

I had a detailed discussion with Eluma CEO Richard Buck before he presented at DEMO and was amazed by the amount of thought he and his team have put into the development and launch of Eluma. I think Eluma has ability to change the way communities and brands interact. Eluma team has show great foresight and brought a product to market which avoids pitfalls faced by web-based communities.

Links:
StartupSquad’s review of Eluma
Eluma
DEMOgod Annoucement
Eluma Presentation

Tags: StartupSquad, DEMO, DEMOfall, DEMOgod

Deals at Judy’s Book Launched

By Vivek Puri | September 29th, 2006 at 10:04 am ET         

Judy’s Book is moving aggressively to gain ground in the local business review and search. At the start of this month Judy’s Book added ‘Deals’ feature which will provide users with deals and coupons from the places they shop both online and in their neighborhood. The ‘Deals’ feature will contain current deals and discounts submitted by users as well as various brands.

Judy’s Book (JB), located in Seattle, WA, was launched in 2004 and is lead by Andy Sack. JB is a well funded company whose investors include Mobius Venture Capital, Ignition Partners, Ackerley Partners, and few angel investors.

JB team is putting in lot of effort to distinguish itself from other deal and review sites. JB deals can be created by the users who also have option to add photos and tags to the deal. JB deals can be voted and commented on by the users which will make sure only the best deals reach the top. JB team is also putting in lot of effort to keep the content fresh and clean. They have a team of deal editors who check for genuine and accurate deals. To find deals for a particular product, users can either search for deals or browse JB or use tags. Users can also subscribe to alerts to get updated on new deals. JB provides browser toolbars which show users the top deals available for any site they visit. Users can also post deals back to JB using the toolbar.

To attract and engage users, JB has setup profit sharing where it will provide commissions to the users who enhance a commissionable deal (a deal that Judy’s Book gets paid on). JB is also launching ‘Expert Shopper’ feature next Tuesday, which is supposed to make shopping easier for the customer. ‘Expert Shopper’ will be a platform where customers can seek help from fellow expert shoppers for finding the right item and for the right price. Besides this, JB has also setup partnership with Valpak recently to distribute their local coupons on judysbook.com.

Couple of issues I noticed includes no option to associate a zip code or state with a deal, which makes it hard to locate local coupons easily. Also as JB tries to offer user rated deals, it should have proper measures in place to prevent hijacking of site by few users or its editorial staff overreacting to certain user activities.

JB surely would have done its calculations but I am bit skeptical about maintaining deal editors team. They better outsource that task or use Amazon Mechanical Turk to lower their risk. I am pretty sure Google won’t do this way.

JB has done great work in identifying the right mix of features from digg, fatwallet (or other deal sites) and its expertise of local business search and reviews. By combining local business search with local/national deals JB can add real value to the site. This area is not without tough competition though and comes at a time when Google has announced that it will also be offering coupons when users search for businesses on Google Maps.

Links:
Deals at Judy’s Book
Judy’s Book

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Deals, Coupons, Judysbook

eBay into social networking - Launches MyWorld

By Vivek Puri | September 29th, 2006 at 08:27 am ET         

eBay has launched new MySpace like social networking feature called MyWorld. MyWorld will replace the user profile page at eBay.

MyWorld page for each user will contain user profile, image, biography, blog, reviews, feedback, rating, and item listing. You can add image to your profile, edit and show your biography, add posts to your blogs. Blog post can be tagged and you can subscribe to RSS feeds for blogs. MyWorld page can also be customized by rearranging the modules.

There is no support for modifying background colors or setting background images as of now. I didn’t see an option to add other users to your network either.

Currently eBay users can edit their MyWorld page. From next month each user profile will take you to his/her MyWorld page.

This is a nice move from eBay, but at a time when the market is inundated with social networking sites. I feel eBay will have tough time growing in such a tight market.

 [via]

Links:
eBay MyWorld

Tags: StartupSquad, eBay, Web2.0, Web_2.0, SocialNetworking

Google upgrades RSS reader

By Vivek Puri | September 28th, 2006 at 09:33 pm ET         

For quite some time now Google Reader had been lying really low on Google Office priority list. But finally they have released a new version of reader with lot of updates.
 
Google reader has now added option to create folders and add subscriptions to folders. Reader also displays count of unread items, and you can “mark all items as read” for a folder or a feed. They have also introduced a sharing component, where users can click and share feed items. These shared items are available on your public page, which can be viewed by anyone who knows the URL. There is also an option to subscribe to the shared feed items. Now feeds can also be viewed in 2 different formats - List View and Expanded View.
 
One interesting feature I found was that same feed can belong to more than 1 folder. If you read any of the feed items from one folder, the item count gets updated in all folders where the feed is present. Other nice features that I discovered include option to import/export opml file, add reader to your personalized Google homepage, and access reader on your mobile phone.
 
I still saw quite a few issues from the javascript side, with pages’ not getting refreshed cleanly, which is unlike other Google Office products. Also there is no option to search among feed items, which is surprising given the fact that it is a reader from Google. But Google Reader is definitely better than the useless Microsoft Max released earlier this month.

Links:
Google Reader

Tags: StartupSquad, Google, RSS, Web2.0, Web_2.0, max