Best idea for Summer 2008: TechCrunch's Web Tablet For $200

Nik Cubrilovic and Michael Arrington of tech blog TechCrunch.com have launched what I found the most interesting idea for this Summer: "Today at Techcrunch we announced that we are building our own web tablet hardware device:
A web Tablet for just 200$"

"Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too."

The Best part of it is the TOUCH SCREEN and also the collaborative side of the project:

"The goal is to keep the machine very simple and very cheap. I think this will be a lot of fun, and it may just turn into an actual product that we can use to surf the web and talk to our friends.

We’ll be coordinating the project over at TechCrunchIT. Leave a comment there if you want to participate and we’ll be in touch soon."

I like the idea of this low-profile screen that could be in every kitchen and every shop.

More details also here.

Tariq KRIM steps down as Netvibes'CEO and is replaced by Freddy MINI

Fresh news from TECHCRUNCH blog:

"Tariq Krim is stepping down as CEO of Netvibes to “spend less time day-to-day” at the company and work on a “new project,” he tells me. (More details on that project later). He will remain on the board of the company and as a non-executive strategic adviser. Current Netvibes COO Freddy Mini will take over the helm as CEO."

“My role was to transfer Netvibes from a personal start page into a widget platform,” says Krim. He feels that the technical foundation for that shift has been completed with the recent release Ginger, the latest version of its site. "

Well, that is a big change and probably a necessary one. But Netvibes is losing a charismatic figure.

Pierre CHAPPAZ, former Co-CEO of Netvibes and founder of Kelkoo and Wikio, an actual investor in Netvibes comments on his own blog that:

"I think it's a good decision. Freddy Mini, Chief Operating Officer of Netvibes for 2 years and based in San Fransisco, has incomparable experience: he was CEO of ZDNet Europe. and then Musicme, before agreeing to join us at Netvibes in 2006. "

"When I resigned from my position as co-CEO last year in order to concentrate my efforts on Wikio , I highlighted how the strategy of distribution and monetization at Netvibes seemed to me essential for success . With Freddy's insistence, Netvibes has in the last year taken great strides in this direction and progressed significantly, supplying a number of large media sites with a personal page service that they could take on and redistribute with their own colors. Freddy is without a shadow of a doubt the man for the job, to continue to develop the distribution, and the widget market, for which Tariq was a true visionary. "

What is strange is that the news is not coming out on any of the Netvibes' Official Blogs, Forums or Streams...

A lack of confidence in Netvibes' own captive audience ?
Shoudn't this news been given to Netvibes' users before anyone else ?
I think so!

Anyway, Thanks Tarik ! :)

Windows 7 will be multi-touch compatible (check the demo)

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

The TechCrunch blog announced that : At the "All Things Digital" Gates and Ballmer presented the new Windows 7. This version to be released in 2010 is Multi-Touch compatible.

I like that :)

Ouriel Ohayon from TechCrunch checks his Netvibes page before working. And you ?

Ouriel Ohayon, has just sent this Tweet on his Twitter and I , with his 1.479 followers, could read:

"coffee, twits, friendfeed, techmeme, RSS, flicr, netvibes then, only, then, work"


Ouriel Ohayon, one of the most influent French (and international) Blogger, in addition of his many professional internet activities is contributing to TechCrunch.com one of the largest blog on earth and editing the French edition of TechCrunch.

Ohayon is involved in the following Web 2.0 companies:

• TechCrunch
• Ads-Click
• playSPEX
• VesTopia
• Outbrain
• StyleShake
• Wikio
• LGilab
• Bahu.com

2,545,000 monthly visitors for Netvibes in January 2008 according to Comscore stats

In a new post by TECHCRUNCH on the war between the personalized homepages, Netvibes is credited of 2,545,000 Monthly visitors in January 2008 by Comscore.

With 3,3% market share of the Personalized Home Pages sector, Netvibes is the First Independent Home Page and 10 times bigger than the other competitor Pageflakes.
The 3 big My player (Yahoo 56.9%, IGoogle 26.4%, Msn, 10.1%) are well behind but AOL/Netscape (3.3% with 2,705,000) is very near...

The all market is measured at 83,228,000 monthly visitors.

To give an idea, for the same period, Comcast measured Facebook at : 97,792 million unique visitors in December, 2007.

ComScore measured the total Internet Audience just for the USA for Januray 2008 at: 183,239,000 and the Total European Internet audience at: 229,690,000 for end 2007.
So the total for USA+EUROPE is = 412,929,000 monthly unique users.

That means that the market for Home pages is maximum 20% of the total Internet market (as Asia and South America are excluded ;) )

PageOnce with Netvibes could become my Single Social Interface ?

Hi,

A new service called PageOnce is also in his beta ;)

They say: "Simply select your personal accounts from social networking, email and travel to entertainment, banking, credit cards and much more and add them to your personal page."

You can retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon.

PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes-like layout.

According to TechCrunch :

"Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim (asked) whether they planned to provide this functionality, said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce."

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run."

In conclusion, PageOnce with Netvibes or netvibes with PageOnce could really become my long waited Single Social Interface. ;)

Choose what you want in the Universes

Hi,

Have you looked at the more than 780 Universes offered by Netvibes?

I did, but was afraid to be obliged to import all the Univers, with all its settings and to loose my time to delete all the unwanted stuff.

But that is not the case : you can choose just one (ore more) widget or feed and import it directly in you own page!

Let's say I am interested by the TECHCRUNCH Univers, but that the only new thing I need is the READ/WRITEWEB feed on the right column. Then I just click on the title and the ADD TO YOUR PAGE message appears, I click on it. Then select the option "SAVE changes to your private page" or the "Back to my private page". And that is it! The widgets you selected are now in your page!

Nice done Netvibes!

NETVIBES numbers (Updated 12/06/07)

Hi,

UPDATED: 12 JUNE 2007 ( MARCH 2007 - FEBRUARY 2007 - JANUARY 2007 - DECEMBER 2006)

I updated and completed the numbers about Netvibes (data in brackets= last known period). For sources check links.

• SIGNED-UP users claimed by Netvibes : 10 million (7.000.00) +43% (+40%)
• estimated "real users" by webmonkian (see also in comments) : 1-2 million
• ALL DAY USERS declared by Netvibes : 10% = 1.000.000
• percentage of users that spend at least 1 hour per day on Netvibes: 33%
• percentage of users that have Netvibes open “virtually the entire day” : 10%
• number of employees : 11-50
• venture capital investment: Accel Partners and Index Ventures for 12 mln US$ (August 2006)

• total number of Modules (API) available: 967 (675 )
• total number of Feeds available: 85.056 (11.503)
• total number of Podcast available: 841 (836)
• total number of Events available : 179 (179)
• total number of Tabs available: 3.553 (3.508)
• total number of Universes available: 187 NEW

• number of Bookmarks for "Netvibes" on deli.ci.us : 23.554 (19.296)
• number of Blog search results for "Netvibes" on TECHNORATI : 28.535 (39.848)
• number of News search results last 30 days for "Netvibes" on DIGG: 330
• number of Web results for "Netvibes" on Google: 29.900.000 (22.400.000)
• number of Image results for "Netvibes" on Google: 185.000 (6.250)
• position of Netvibes for sources of TechCrunch traffic in December 2006: 6 with 32,444 referrals
• traffic rank for Netvibes in Alexa.com : 822 (734)
• country of origin according to Alexa.com: USA: 22.3% (24.4) , F: 14.2 (15.3)%, D: 9.3 (9.0)%, UK: 6.6 (6.7)%, S: 6.6 (6.5°%
• percent of Internet users who visited Netvibes last 3 monthes (Alexa.com) : 0.187555%(0.2095%)
• percentage of Netvibes for of all web aggregator clicks to FeedBurner publisher's content: 9% (Feb 07)
• percentage of Netvibes for all item views recorded by FeedBurner: 3% (Feb 07)

Netvibes announces Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility

Hi,

yesterday in London, Tariq Krim (CEO of Netvibes), as reported by Michael Arrington from TECHCRUCH has announced that the new Coriander version of Netvibes (still to come...) will provide a solution to allow cross-paltform compatibility of widgets.

In this way, developers will have just to develop their widgets (module, flakes,...) as the compatibility on every platform will be guaranteed by an Universal Wideget Api.

The advantages according to 606TECH are:

"- widgets created for Netvibes will work on Vista, Opera, Google and Mac, with Yahoo support soon to follow
- this universal widget is important because a single widget created will be able to be embedded in most platforms
- it also allows for an outward growth of Netvibes widgets so they can become increasingly mobile and personal
- the incorporation of OpenID goes along
- open sourcing with the Coriander release of Netvibes means anyone can increase the number of platforms Netvibes widgets can operate on . "

And the advantages for us Netvibers, will be that widgets (modules) already developed for Netvibes will be available for other platforms (Google, Yahoo, ...) .
Well, it would be better if it was the other way round...