Blog closed

I won’t publish posts in this blog anymore.
Feel free to browse the blog history – I’ll add a reference here to the new blog.

Cheers,
Giacomo

UPDATE: Please give a look to my new blog and subscribe to its RSS if you want.

 

Tiscali and Nokia together to provide Homezone

I’ve browsed a couple of minutes looking for an English version of this article, but unsuccessfully.

Anyway what’s relevant here is that Tiscali and Nokia partnered to provide a new service, called Homezone, in Italy.

The approach is simple and somehow not-so-new, anyway it is an actual implementation from two giants of Telecommunications and in my opinion must be followed with attention.

How does it work?
Tiscali customers with ADSL and VoIP have a geographic number associated with their lines. With Homezone, while under WiFi coverage, users can place and receive calls with their Tiscali numbers using their Nokia E series mobile phones (E61, E61i, E65). These are dual mode phones with an embedded SIP client (I wrote about it before).

The set of supported mobile phones is perhaps too restrictive, but prices for dual mode phones are going down and this will help the service in taking off.

A final point: keep in mind that if you know a SIP provider with geographic numbers provisioning you can do this by yourself, without any need for Tiscali or a specific telephone company…

 

What Jaiku will represent for Google

After I watched two interviews by Phil Wolf to Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku, I’ve found another really insightful article by Phil Wolf about how Jaiku will fit into Google.

More than just talking about microblogging, Phil emphasizes the presence and real-time communication aspects.

This article is very mind-opening for those who follow Google moves (I mean, everybody), and it’s surely worth a read.

 

Google People to be launched

Google People is going to be launched in the Q1 of 2008.

If you are searching for someone, or trying to retrieve information about the life and personal story of someone you know or want to know, with Google People you’ll find all you need.

You could also search for something that person wrote in an article, blog or book, or said inside a video or podcast available on the Internet. Pretty cool!

Another outstanding idea from Google Labs!

*Disclaimer: this is not true. Just a joke I wanted to be the first to talk about people search tools provided by Google…

 

Google ______ Jaiku

I’m sure you can fill in the missing word in the title…

So microblogging+presence isn’t such a bad service to provide in Google’s mind…

The question is: how many dollars/user are they going to pay? In my opinion Jaiku has about 0,5M users… would the total be more or less than $50M?

We’ll see. In the meanwhile, congratulations to Jaiku’s guys: well done!*

*Any analogy with the “An Officer and a Gentleman” ending is purely accidental.

 

How to compare two Web2.0 services, and be wrong

As you may have noticed reading my blog, I’m involved with Hictu. Indeed, as Enrico realized, I consider myself its Dad.

As any other dad, I desired Hictu, I planned it, I attended its birth, presented it to my friends and relatives, and I’m notifying all these people each time there are news: new features, new comments, something unexpected…

Jokes apart, we decided to provide a free, public beta version as soon as possible. We launched Hictu on December 2006, gathering critics and suggestions that made it possible for us to grow and refine our identity: a community for video microbloggers. Mashable wrote about it, and again in September.

Microblogging was a quite mature tool for marketing and building social networks, but we added a simple yet differentiating feature: video posts (recorded directly from the browser).

Yesterday Techcrunch presented Seesmic, a new startup:

The service can be described as a video based Twitter, although it is also much more than that. The grand vision behind Seesmic is for it to become a very open online video/television service where people are constantly interacting around both user generated and professional content.

As Luca commented, this seems to be describing Hictu, but Techcrunch has never wrote a line about it… quite odd.

Yesterday I’ve read why Seesmic is interesting and Hictu is not: we didn’t move to San Francisco (note: we are based in a wonderful island in the Mediterranea sea, Sardinia). I’m referring to a blog post by Robert Scoble, in which he compares Seesmic and Hictu and presents the launch of the former as an example.

There are three points:
1. The founder, Loic Le Meur, visited many bloggers and filmed their meeting
2. The founder, Loic Le Meur, moved to San Francisco
3. Seesmic uses Twitter APIs (my note: this means that Seesmic in the future will depend on Twitter).

Maybe it’s because I don’t live in California but I’ve always thought, even in a buzz-centric industry as Web 2.0 is, that facts matter.

Robert, did you try Hictu? Did you send me your suggestions through the “Hictu as you like it” section? Did you invite your friends? Did you ask me what we are going to provide in the future? Did you create and embed a videopost? Did you notice that Hictu in itself is a mashup of many different IM and VoIP services?

In the meanwhile, since Seesmic is still in a private alpha, I subscribed to try it and I’m waiting to check it out and write down my view, after I’ve been using it for a while.

 

Daily wrapup from Hictu, 25/9

It’s been a while that I’m using Hictu to satisfy my need to share contents I read.

Today I present a review of my activity. I hope you’ll enjoy that reading and be willing to go deeper for some points.

You can see the entire list of my posts here.

1. Are Comparison Search Engines threatened by Google? Read David Hawk’s view. (Jeremy Liew reprises the same point)

2. So, maybe Hictu is not about microblogging rather than Tumblelogging? (I do not like this word…)

3. Hictu in the Top 100 Search Engines? Odd enough…

4. Keyword search on Twitter? Something I look forward to use…

5. Jaiku’s guru interviewed by Michael Moser.

6. Relevant Mind helps consumer in choosing the best product: useful tool (and I’m waiting for the windsurf section…)

 

Most influential bloggers… I’m missing something

Leo Babauta, in his NorthxEast, publishes the list of 50 most influential bloggers.

I don’t have clear in mind what is the method to evaluate this influence (but I suspect it’s based on technorati ranks), but I admit I don’t know anyone belonging to the first 10 positions… The first I know (but I don’t read on a regular basis and I’m not subscribed to) it’s Seth Godin’s.

I’m going to check them out in the next days, and maybe post some comment about them here or on Hictu, but what I would ask to Leo Babauta is: “Where’s Beppe Grillo blog?” It’s the first in Italy and it’s literally moving hundred of thousands of people with his opinions… I’ll investigate further.

Update: as I thought, Beppe Grillo is very high on Technorati ranking as well: 8th!

 

Puppets rule

Why are puppets so popular among videoposts on Hictu? I can’t say… anyway they’re funny.

View this:

 

Online journals: is AD going to replace subscriptions revenues?

This morning I’ve read the article by Jeremy Liew, commenting the Wall Street Journal analysis on ad revenues for online journals. I’ve been a little bit surprised to see that Jeremy caught the negative aspect: “News can’t be an online only business“…

The picture showing the ratio between ad revenues from print newspaper and online journals, indeed, is a clear indicator that ad revenues are still a minimum part of the overall ad revenues (see below).

But reading the WSJ article, an aspect is definitely interesting: making the online journals free can increase the ad revenues and hence compensate the loss in subscription fees…

So, this for me is a good news.