In July, Google announced its plans to shut down iGoogle, its personalized homepage that users customized with gadgets of their choosing, including things like Twitter updates, shopping lists, calendar appointments, news feeds, weather, and more. There was a surprising amount of backlash at the time – apparently, some folks out there were still pretty reliant on having a one-stop-shop portal as… → Read More
Netvibes has just been acquired by European product design company Dassault Systèmes (sure this isn’t the type of thing I usually write, but I like the founder Tariq Krim so bear with me here … ).
French startup Netvibes is an analytics dashboard that allows Fortune 500 companies to track their social media presence throughout the realtime web. Dassault is a “3D experience “design company… → Read More
Fresh off the heels of announcing the acquisition of Android Twitter client Twidroyd and popurls, Twitter search and advertising platform operator TweetUp has signed up several new distribution partners.
TweetUp will be powering its search results with four new publishers, namely Business.com, Netvibes, Farlex’s online reference sites including TheFreeDictionary.com and TheFreeLibrary.com, as… → Read More
Netvibes, which has been making start pages more personalized and more ‘real-time’ for users for years now, is working on an iPad application website.
The alpha version of the site will be available later today (screenshot below), but users will have to wait a couple of more weeks for the launch of the more polished version (screenshot above). The site you’ll be able to visit later today will not… → Read More
On the heels of announcing profitability, startup NetVibes is announcing a new feature today to help users monitor the realtime web. NetVibes is launching a personal dashboard monitoring platform, called Instant Dashboards. The new feature allows users to enter a keyword on NetVibes’ site to pull up an instant dashboard that automatically collects all of the latest photos, videos, news, feeds… → Read More
Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini announced today that the startup founded five years ago has finally made it to profitability. The site has seen a lot of changes since then. It began as one of the original Web 2.0 personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and… → Read More
We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”
As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated… → Read More
Netvibes, original widget homepage, is morphing into something much more interesting. The next version of the service, dubbed Wasabi, is a potent stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and much more in an extremely manageable interface. Wasabi will become available early next week in a private beta, but you can start signing up for it now.
CEO… → Read More
If you run a website that others are going to use, there’s probably a desire to find a mixture between user-customization and putting forth your content. For simple sites, that’s easy enough, but what if you want to change the design of pages, and put in elements like new widgets? Netvibes now has a way. → Read More
I find myself relying on traditional feed readers less and less these days (stream readers like TweetDeck and Seesmic have replaced them as an hourly habit). But when I do look at my feeds, I like to look at them through Feedly, which presents the stories in a visually appealing, magazine-like layout. Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that lets you import all of your blog and news feeds from Google… → Read More
NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out a new feature today that lets users create personalized widget-based web pages. NetVibes’s tool, called Theme Publishing, is a visual design editor that lets users personalize and edit every part of their page’s’ theme, from images to… → Read More
NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out helpful “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter tomorrow.
NetVibes has offered Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets for some time now. Once you insert the respective widgets onto your NetVibes homepage, now you… → Read More
I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and… → Read More
For those of you who need more information widgets in your life, Netvibes is adding widget recommendations to its homepage service. It just started rolling this feature out today, and all Netvibes users should see it within the next two or three days. It looks at all of the information widgets on all the pages and tabs in your account, compares that to other members with overlapping taste, and… → Read More
Alltop, the “online magazine rack” that offers visitors a clean overview of RSS-feed enabled sources categorized by topic, is launching version 3.0 today with the addition of a custom feed reader that’s supposed to make it easier for users to personalize their user experience when browsing for online news. But how personalized is it really?
The feature, dubbed MyAlltop, lets users create a custom… → Read More
Netvibes founder Tariq Krim sent me a new screenshot of Jolicloud, the Linux-based Netbook-optimized operating system he’s building (we first covered Jolicloud last December).
The screen shot, which is significantly evolved from what we saw in Paris, shows a set of featured applications that mixes desktop and cloud software – Facebook, Skype, Meebo and Youtube, among others, are shown with large… → Read More
The widget is ready for its closeup. Today at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Netvibes announced a major step forward in how widgets are presented on a start page. Instead of the standard jumble of boxes filled mostly with text-only feeds, Netvibes members can now arrange the different widgets they subscribe to in different layouts that help to break up the page. And within a given widget, they… → Read More
Netvibes, the site that lets users customize their homepages with a variety of widgets, has partnered with Rambler.ru to bring its widgets to the massive Russian web portal. Rambler is the Yahoo of Russia, with an estimated 40 million users and 3 billion monthly pageviews. The deal is being described as “multi-year” and worth “multi-millions”, but further details haven’t been disclosed. … → Read More
If Netvibes is getting old and you’re tired of looking at your desktop to find all your favorite apps, Schmedley might be a worthwhile alternative.
Leading up to its public beta next week, Schmedley is offering 5,000 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers who want to take the site for a spin. The premise is simple: you sign up and get brought to your start page, which can be littered with… → Read More
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo. It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with… → Read More
Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages. Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’… → Read More
The personalized start page is dead. Long live the personalized start page. Pageflakes, a nice-looking but perennial also-ran in the world of start-page startups, has been officially acquired by Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe, a deal we reported earlier this week. Terms were not disclosed, but it was a combination of cash and stock. Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen will remain in charge of the… → Read More
It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars – Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal… → Read More
Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base – nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end of 2005 that we stopped paying attention. As is often the case… → Read More
Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts. The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it… → Read More
Netvibes is opening up the beta for its Ginger release, and 500 invites have been reserved for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up here (enter code: “TCGINGER500″). Ginger will become the default interface for all Netvibes members in mid-February, but if you click fast you can get a peak now. Netvibes is a customizable start page that lets you add any RSS feed, as well as other… → Read More
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube… → Read More
Google gadgets came to the Mac today and now Yahoo is releasing an update of their own. They’ve upgraded their Konfabulator widget platform to 4.5 (not currently up) and overhauled their site’s user interface to incorporate better user feedback. While you can get all the technical improvements from Yahoo’s own upcoming announcement. The highlights are support for Flash and HTML… → Read More
The global hip-hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Naturally, there are lots of online properties dedicated to Hip Hop culture. And now they have a customizable Ajax home page, too. New York based global Grind launches this morning… → Read More
I like Netvibes. It’s a great idea and generally a little more user friendly than Google Homepage and they even made us a cool universe that offers a glimpse into the twisted mind of a certain CG editor. It’s like reading my diary! → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
