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The Twitter Cycle

Olivier Coudert — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 09:40:41 +0000

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Twitter Maps America’s Mood in Real Time

Olivier Coudert — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:31:10 +0000

What’s the mood in the US? To answer the question, researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard College fed about 300 million tweets to a system based on ANEW [...]

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So will Buzz and Facebook finally bury Twitter?

Olivier Coudert — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:42:51 +0000

Buzz was introduced by Google with much clamor. Since then, we have seen a lot of debate around it: Google stepping into the social media arena cannot go unnoticed. Many quickly saw Buzz as a Twitter killer [...] Continue reading So will Buzz and Facebook finally bury Twitter? Related posts: Is Google +1 button the [...] [...]

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Twitter and snowflakes

Olivier Coudert — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:50:48 +0000

5NX9DCF979QD According to the official weather service, the UK has just suffered through its longest spell of freezing conditions since December 1981.

The recent winter storms across the whole of the UK wreaked havoc with public transport and generally disrupted the lives of millions of UK residents. Soon hundreds of thousands of UK residents turned to a Twitter-based application, the UK Snow Map. Created by freelance web developer Ben Marsh and powered by 34SP.com, the application lets Twitter users report where snow is falling and by which amount. It displays the reports in real-time on a map of the UK. It works regardless of the cloud cover, unlike weather satellites.

The system is deceptively simple: anyone with a Twitter account can report on her local snow conditions with the hashtag #uksnow. She rates the snowfall from 0 (no snow) to 10 (blizzard), and specifies her location using the name of the town or the ZIP code –no geo-tag support yet. Those tweets are then analyzed and placed on a map of the UK, giving a real-time visual picture of the local snow conditions as reported by actual residents on the ground.

The UK Snow Map has been active since February 2009, and has seen a huge increased in use, mirroring the Twitter popularity in the UK, as well as this year’s harsh winter. At the height of the snowfall last week, the map received 50,000 visits in one day –as many as the total number of visits it received last year. During the recent wintry weather, the application processed over 100,000 unique snow reports from all over the UK, with rates of over 100 tweets per minute at peak times.

Next step, using geo-location and more hashtags for real-time maps of fog and rain? Or to-the-minute traffic info? What kind of application would you build on top of it?

Is Twitter Flattening? A Short Answer

Olivier Coudert — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:19:31 +0000

Compete and Quantcast have now released their latest data about the traffic on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for December. According to Compete’s report, twitter.com’s US traffic reached 22.81 million unique visitors [...]

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The truth about Twitter usage

Olivier Coudert — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:46:11 +0000

Three research firms reported traffic to Twitter.com dropping between the month of September and October. According to these firms, the number of unique US visitors to the Twitter website went down [...] Continue reading The truth about Twitter usage Related posts: Twitter sure is a rollercoaster, but going up or down? Is Twitter Flattening? A [...] [...]

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Twitter sure is a rollercoaster, but going up or down?

Olivier Coudert — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:53:22 +0000

The last 10 days have been pretty interesting to follow in the fast moving world of Twitter. They showed a contrasting (or seemingly so) picture of where the super-hyped company is heading. Let us rewind the last few events [...] Continue reading Twitter sure is a rollercoaster, but going up or down? Related posts: The [...] [...]

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What is Twitter’s next step?

Olivier Coudert — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:20:08 +0000

Lots has been written and hyped about Twitter since its creation three years ago. Twitter has been touted as the fastest growing social network (19% of U.S. Internet users tweet), and a communication medium with still unforeseen capabilities. The company [...]

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What was hot at the TechCrunch Munich event?

Olivier Coudert — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:12:44 +0000

I was today in Sun Microsystems offices, which co-hosted the TechCrunch Munich event. Mike Butcher, editor TechCrunch Europe, was here to take about 150 attendants through a few presentations and 12 startup pitches. I promised I would write about what I liked, so here it goes.

The breakroom had a tweeter wall with live reaction of the attendance –hashtag #tcm09, check it out.

The first to present was Mathias Roth from iOpus.com. His message was quite simple: if you are a startup that wants to get attention, be the first to develop for a new platform, any new platform. The rational: if you are among the first, chance is that you will stick. Look at the top 50 add-ons to Firefox today: half of them have been introduced within the year Firefox made its add-ons development platform available. Mathias’ recommendation: get on Chrome’s bandwagon and develop your add-on now –there are only about 25 Chrome add-ons today. Even though Chrome’s add-ons website will not come before the end of the year, it will pay to be among the first.

Next speaker was Rainer Maerkle from Holtzbrinck Ventures. He gave a great talk about what it takes to launch a startup. I will not do justice by trying to reduce his talk to a few words, but it would come as something like: do your homework, focus, take risks, focus, execute, focus. Oh, and don’t wait for VC money, or don’t over-specify your product: just do it and get it out, then release often.

Then come the exciting part: 12 startups pitching for 3mn each + 1mn for question. Some did great, some did not do as well, but all show the enthusiasm of the entrepreneur. Disclaimer: I am sharing what I thought of the presentations and of the startups ideas and business models; this is a very subjective digest, go visit these sites and make up your own mind.

Goutez (food for friends). They provide an on-line market place to buy local food products. Lots of people tried to be on-line food resellers, but only a fraction is still alive. I don’t know whether there is a market large enough to have a sustainable business here.
Communote. They propose an enterprise microblogging platform. Basically, a secured place where people can collaborate and share info. It looks pretty slick, and it has already a few customers. But having a Twitter for enterprise might not be enough. They had quite a number of questions regarding their differentiation with respect to other enterprise collaborative platforms. Also, may I ask what if GoogleWave goes enterprise?
Graph.me. Good presentation on a platform that enables users to build up their own poll, which they ask friends or social network members to answer (Facebook, MySpace). Business model is to sell the resulting data pool to marketing research. Neat idea. Obvious question is the privacy problem.
CaptchaAd. Propose a video ad CAPTCHA. Instead of your usual textual CAPTCHA, a short ad video is played and the used must answer a simple question (e.g., what was the brand of the car in the video?) to prove she is not a spambot. Clever idea, but will the users enjoy watching 10 seconds of video ad to fill in a form?
Red Panda. Intentional browsing add-on for Firefox: it instantaneously shows on a side-bar links (news, product reviews, Wikipedia articles, tweets, etc) that are relevant to whatever web page you are currently displaying. Very cool. Business model is targeted ad.
intelliAd. They have a web platform to optimize SEM campaign, e.g., determine the best bid for a keyword to optimize CPI. Easy setup, nice GUI, these guys are flying with 20 customers and are looking in expanding in the US. Very solid product and business plan, a success in the making.
Vicommerce.com. They provide a layer on top of video players that is used to define clickable area by the on-line resellers. This results in a very entertaining on-line shopping experience. They already have some major customers, solid business plan.
Getyourguide.com. A platform to get travelers and local activity providers together. Nice but is that enough differentiation with Yahoo! travel and Tripadvisor, to name only two?
Directededge.com. They provide a user recommendation plug-in to businesses. Based on the fact that 20% of Amazon’s revenue comes from user recommendation click-throughs, this is definitely a good idea. The product is still in an early stage, stay tuned.
SnipClip.com. They aim at monetizing brands on social networks (Facebook, MySpace), which are known to have a very low clock-through rate. The idea is to sell branded virtual goods (mostly media). Creative, let’s see whether the social network community will bite.
Terminii. Propose a web-based appointment services for small and mid-size business. Definitely useful. Disastrous presentation: the presenter stopped his talk because of slides issue. Mike Butcher, the host of the event, did a great job to bring back the speaker and let him explain his business.
Valuescope. A news aggregator filtered with natural language analysis, targeted at sales and marketing. Extremely good presentation, very focused.

Mike Butcher’s top 5 picks were:

and his top one pick was (drum roll please):

#1: Graph.me

Overall a very interesting day, very well organized, with a great host. It showed that Munich has talents and a good VC structure to produce a dynamic startup environment. Congratulations to the speakers and to those that came to pitch their startups!

What to see at the TechCrunch Munich event?

Dilbert made my day

Olivier Coudert — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:57:28 +0000

Shortest blog so far, all in one Dilbert’s insightful cartoon (click the image for better view). Thanks Scott Adams!

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