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 so the acquisition actually seems jarring at first, but Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini tells me that the acquisition actually makes sense in terms of connecting what people say about a company to the design process through the Netvibes dashboard.
→ 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 well as a number of (unnamed) newspapers. → 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 enable people to create or edit Netvibes accounts and won’t allow users to share content via Twitter, Facebook and the like, among other limitations. → 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, search results, Twitter conversations and more around that topic. Instant dashboards are automatically updated in near real-time.
The dashboard is essentially a way for users to track content on the realtime web. For example, if I create a dashboard for Tiger Woods, NetVibes will aggregate videos from Google search, news from Google news, photos from Flickr, realtime search results from Yahoo, Tweets about Woods and more. → 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 advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.
I chatted with Mini today, who says that the company is profitable on a net income basis. He won’t go into details on revenues, but the company has 40 employees and two offices. Just to cover salaries, it’s got to be pulling in a few million dollars a year. Mini did break down the revenues by product line, however: → 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 parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order. → 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 Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order. → 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 Reader (or from your bookmarks, Netvibes, or Bloglines).
Today it will be releasing Feedly Explore, the latest version of its reader. The main new feature is an explore page which helps people discover new blogs to read by highlighting celebrity reading lists, staff picks, and sources based on popular tags. → 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 background.
The layout of the editing tool is fairly simple. Users “click and pick” on the page:, meaning they click which part they want to edit and pick options from a color palette and design option menus. NetVibes offers a directory of themes or you can create your own theme. You can also publish your theme to the gallery for other NetVibes members to use. Every change is shown live in a preview pane, making it easy to see how a particular design will look. Plus, users can add widgets, feeds, social networks and more to their pages. The bonus: it’s all free. → 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 will be able to click on any friend, screen name or hashtag in the widget, then drag it outside and drop it on your page to create a new custom widget. The new widget will follow a person or topic. For example, you can take the stream of a news source or friend from Twitter and create a separate widget that tracks only their stream. → 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 then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.
While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways. → 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 suggests content they have that you don’t.
When users click on the “add content” button on the top left, a “Recommended” option will appear below the widget search box. Clicking on that will generate 12 new widget recommendations across nine categories of interest: news, sports, business, technology, entertainment, shopping, lifestyle, games, and travel.
When I tried it, most of the recommendations were for news, since the way I use Netvibes is to scan dozens of blogs and news feeds on a single page. → 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 page with a so-called vanity URL (e.g. my.alltop.com/techcrunch) where they can add feeds from a variety of topics and display all the widgets on one page, which can then be shared with others. All users need to do is register and add feeds to their public pages by clicking a small plus sign displayed next to feed widgets.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc. have been around for years, and they pretty much all offer the above and much more. → 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 icons that make it easier on Netbook users, who have to make do with smallish screens.
Jolicloud will eventually support touchscreens, Krim told me. We’re trying to get a copy and install it on our CrunchPad prototype to see how it does, and share video. → 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 can choose different viewing options for how they see each feed, including carousel view, magazine, streaming ticker, and normal text-headline views.
Maybe I’m just excited about this because I’m a former magazine guy, but I always thought Netvibes and most other start pages were way too ugly. The problem with start pages, visually, is that once you add more than a dozen or so feeds, all the boxes meld together and it becomes difficult to see at a glance what has changed. Simply changing the layout to emphasize more important feeds, and then tweaking the look of adjacent widget boxes, makes it much more pleasurable to read. → 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. Netvibes availability on Rambler.ru is expected to begin in November.
This marks the first time Netvibes has licensed its platform for installation and distribution to an independent third party, and probably won’t be the last. In order to stay competitive with other widget hubs like iGoogle, Netvibes would do well to spur its growth by offering its widgets to other region-specific portals (that said, Netvibes has been doing well, with a reported 500 million widgets served montly). According to the press release, the Rambler homepage will include Google Search, Blinx video search, and a number of Russian services like Price.ru. → 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 well-designed widgets that let you search Google and Yahoo at the same time, check up on your Twitter feed, work with Facebook, check your stocks, and much more, without surfing to the respective sites.
Schmedley offers a full range of widgets to add to your page and each can be expanded or removed with a click of the mouse. The design is quite appealing and the general uniformity of the widget designs improves the experience, but considering the popularity of Netvibes, it’ll be interesting to see how Schmedley can compete. → 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 the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers. Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers). You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes. Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Netvibes Information provided by CrunchBase → 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’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most. Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position. While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption. Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either. CrunchBase Information Netvibes Digg Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
San Francisco, CA
