Looks like Jaiku founder and former Googler Jyri Engeström is up to something new. According to an SEC filing, a startup listing Engeström as chief executive officer called Pingpin has just raised $775,000 in financing.
Backers are BetaWorks (the startup’s address matches that of the early-stage investment firm) and True Ventures, as founder and managing partner Jon Callaghan is listed as a director as well. → Read More
Google has an unfortunate history of buying companies — and then running them into the ground. Sometimes, this leads to a bit of ill-will between the Internet giant and the companies’ founders. We saw a perfect example of this when Dodgeball’s founders (including current Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley) quit Google in a huff. Today, the co-founder of another acquisition, Panoramio, is out as well, but he insists the company is happy under Google.
In a post today on the Panoramio blog, co-founder Eduardo Manchón, says that after four and a half years working on the service, it’s time to leave. Google acquired Panoramio in mid-2007 and Manchón has been there ever since, running the service. He notes that, “Acquisitions can be complicated, and the private nightmare of a founder is the site not surviving the process, but after some time Panoramio feels very comfortable at Google.” → Read More
In October 2007, Google bought the Finnish social networking site Jaiku. In the following couple of years, they somehow managed to do absolutely nothing with it, even as rival Twitter rose in popularity. Today, co-founder Jyri Engeström is leaving Google.
When we last talked to him in May, Engeström seemed to be enjoying what he was working on at Google. And as he told us in January, “We’re not dying, we’re morphing,” after Google decided to cease internal development of Jaiku. Rather than killing off Jaiku completely, like it did with Dodgeball and others, Google decided to allow Jaiku to be ported over to App Engine, and open-sourced. Sadly, still not much has come of that. And now, it’s unclear how much Engeström will have to do with the project from this point on. → Read More
I just finished moderating a panel with Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström about emerging social behavior on the web at the Next09 conference in Hamburg, and I got the chance to speak with both of them separately afterwards and recorded part of the conversations on video. The first one I’m featuring is the short talk I had with Engeström, the Finnish entrepreneur who left his senior product manager position at Nokia in 2006 to co-found one of the first micro-publishing services, Jaiku.
Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are. → Read More
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).
What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google. → Read More
Last week, Google announced that the company was unceremoniously discontinuing or at least ceasing development of a number of services it had launched or acquired in the past, including Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and The Mashup Editor. The shutdown of the latter two was announced on the Google Code blog by VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, along with some explanation regarding microblogging Jaiku, which many tech blogs and news outlets reported was merely being kept alive without further plans for the Twitteresque service.
Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström responded to the reports today in a blog post claiming that the service – which has always remained invite-only ever since its launch even after Google’s acquisition in 2007 – is actually going to serve for something more interesting than he set it out to be, and I think he’s got a point. → Read More
Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter’s most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google’s technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.
But now we’re seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends. → Read More
FON (better known for building a WiFi community) launched Twitxr today through their FON Labs group. Basically, it’s Twitter but allows picture uploads when sending a message (which makes it particularly useful for camera phones). FON founder Martin Varsavsky announced the product on his blog. So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter. Another feature I like is the fact that you tell it where you are, so location information is included. Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application. The application automatically adds location information to your photos and updates. Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos – see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well – which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi. Update: I’m actually going to re-jailbreak my iphone to test the software – the fact that uploading is so easy and it adds location information is worth noting. If it works really well, this could actually be a reason for me to stop posting directly to Twitter. CrunchBase Information Twitter Fon Twitxr Martin Varsavsky Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I am convinced that we are going to see a big growth in voice apps that use a mobile phone as a microphone. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, London-based startup SpinVox announced a new feature of its speech-to-text service that lets users call in their Twitters or send in messages to Facebook or Jaiku. Is making a phone call easier than thumbing an SMS? Depends what kind of phone you have and what kind of person you are. But the Dictaphone is now social. This will appeal at least to all those people who like to record their notes into a mini tape recorder. They can share those thoughts with the world, and computers will transcribe them. As far as I can see from a quick perusal of SpinVox’s Website, its service is only available in Europe, and it is not free. But it is an obvious solution to the mobile user-interface problem. The best input technology for a mobile phone is speaking into it. Maybe competitors SimulScribe, Jott, or Yap will step up to the plate in the U.S. Wait, there is already a way to turn a phone into a microphone for any Web application. It is called the MyVox API from VoodoVox. It is ad-supported so it is free. And the best app built on the API can win $25,000. Hat tip to our man in Spain, Crunchgear’s John Biggs, who alerted me to the SpinVox announcement, and discovered these weird blockhead dolls at its booth at MWS: CrunchBase Information SpinVox Yap Voodoovox Jott SimulScribe Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google has teamed with Twitter to provide a Twitter/ Google mashup for Super Tuesday. Tweets relating to Super Tuesday are overlaid on a Google Map, along with other data including YouChoose ’08 videos, Google News election headlines and primary state results. The site is live here. Google is also offering gadgets with the results as they come in. Google has tracked big events before in a similar fashion to this, but what’s different here is the tie-in with Twitter. Google acquired Twitter rival Jaiku in October, and we haven’t heard much about Jaiku since, aside from some intermittent reports that the service was stagnating under Google and that users were switching to Twitter. Could this new deal be a recognition by Google that Twitter is where it’s at, its $100 million buy of Jaiku aside? Or was Jaiku simply another tech buy that will be merged into Android and cease to be a Twitter competitor? (Jaiku had a strong mobile platform on top of being simply a Twitter clone.) Lets hope that either Twitter’s new hosting Verio can handle the traffic, or Google has lent Twitter some server space, otherwise by about 9-10pm EST tonight as solid results start coming through, the only thing we might see on the mashup is an error message similar to the one top right in this post. CrunchBase Information Twitter Jaiku Google Maps Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Automattic has released Prologue, a Twitter style service for groups that is also being pitched as a distributed Twitter. According to Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg, the new service is way for users to share short messages with a corporate structure, or with private messaging between different groups. Mullenweg says that although it’s not initially aimed at becoming a distributed Twitter, they are offering the template on an open source basis and that if people want to hack it for this purpose, “you’re welcome to.” The concept of a distributed Twitter has been discussed in certain circles for the better part of the last year. The concept is to decentralize a short message service, therefore overcoming the constant issues Twitter has with service provision, or in simple terms, many people host the service across many servers, and they all talk to one and other. Allen Stern at Centernetworks says that “With WordPress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.” Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but the key to Twitter’s success has been three fold. One is its sheer volume of users that has seen it defeat competitors such as Jaiku by providing the most active and rich user base. Secondly although the centralized service is a weakness, it’s also a strength because when you connect to others on Twitter, you connect to others on Twitter. No working out whether the server they’re on is up-to-date, live or even compatible, it just works (when it’s not down, or “temporarily overloaded”). Third is the open access to Twitter via third party tools; just ask Leah Culver from Pownce (who’s not one of my fans) about why open access is vital in building something like this. Prologue may provide some open access, but its distributed nature will mean that ultimately it will be a niche product; possibly a good niche product, but it’s not going to knock the Twitter bird off its perch any time soon. CrunchBase Information Automattic Pownce Jaiku Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
BREAKING NEWS: Jaiku, the Twitter (and Pownce)-like service from Finland, has been bought by Google. Jaiku Founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen today posted this on their homepage: “While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.” The terms of the acquisition have not been released. This is a fascinating move by Google which would have looked at Twitter prior to this acquisition, and Twitter’s recent $5 million series A funding last July. There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now. More coverage on TechCrunch UK. → Read More
Microblogging platform Jaiku has added Jabber-based instant messaging capabilities to its service. The new feature will allow Jaiku users using Jaiku’s Web, iPhone, and Nokia Series 60 smart phone clients to communicate with users on Jabber-based IM networks including Google Talk. Functionality includes the ability to instantly add and read new posts, comments, channel messages, and receive notifications of inbound responses directly. Jaiku already provides a number of extra features that are not currently available on the more popular (and it’s main competitor) Twitter. Jaiku users can choose and receive web feeds from their friends online activities, for example, Flickr photos, updates from specific blogs, Last.fm recently played tracks and others. To use the service, Jaiku users should add jaiku@jaiku.com to their respective Jabber-based IM client. → Read More
TwitKu is a new site that is sort of a Meebo (web instant messaging) for the Twitter and Jaiku “presence blogging” services. The site brings your Twitter and Jaiku accounts onto one screen and adds a posting interface that allows you to post just to one of the services, or to both. The benefit for many people that use both services religiously is obvious. Very simple and very useful for some people. Both Twitter and Jaiku have APIs, making this possible (or at least manageable). Clones/similar products like Pownce and the new Yappd don’t have APIs. When and if those services release them, I’d expect TwitKu to quickly add those services as well. And that would save those of us who want to use all of the services but refuse to choose a lot of time. And since Twitter and Jaiku are all about presence and status updates of friends, there’s no reason not to add Facebook status right away, too. → Read More
So I’ve had a week now to play around with Pownce, Kevin Rose’s (the founder of Digg, pictured left) newly launched Twitter killer. Twitter, which launched a year ago, was obviously used as the initial inspiration for the Pownce. They both allow users to sign up, add friends, and broadcast quick notes to people. The main differences: Twitter is mobile-ready, allowing users to receive friend requests and new messages via text message. And Pownce gives users more flexibility in communicating by allowing messages just to friends. Pownce also allows different kinds of messages – file transfers, events, links and plain text messages (Twitter allows text and links only). There’s no reason, though, that users will use both. They’ll go with one or the other, or neither. So is Pownce good enough to beat Twitter? The early adopter crowd is going to be torn on this one. (Just about) everyone loves Kevin Rose, and anything he launches is going to get serious attention – on Digg, tech blogs and mainstream press. But a lot of people like Twitter, too, and that application has already reached the “network effect” stage of its business cycle. It continues to grow fast. And Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter (and Odeo and Blogger), is also well liked in Silicon Valley. A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an AIR desktop application, although there are similar apps for Twitter, too. Another thing to consider that’s not on the chart – Twitter has had, and continues to have, massive performance issues. It is slow or down way too often. Services like Twitter and Pownce (and there are others, too – Jaiku, Kyte and many more) are highly viral and benefit from the network effect. People want to join the service that all of their friends already use, and so each new user adds value to the network as a whole. By that measure, Twitter is far ahead of Pownce. Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the → Read More
