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 business and help to integrate it into LiveVideo, as well as continue to maintain it as a separate site. Despite its easy of use and appealing UI, Pageflakes never really took off. ComScore measured only 50,000 unique U.S. visitors in March, compared to 1.4 million for competitor Netvibes. (And 191,000 uniques worldwide in February, versus 2.4 million for Netvibes). iGoogle had 7.4 million U.S. visitors in March, and My Yahoo had 19 million. But Cohen, who used to run My Yahoo, argues that the difference has more to do with distribution deals than organic growth and that linking up with Live Universe will give Pageflakes the distribution it needs. Says Cohen: A lot of the growth in the personalized start page category has historically been kickstarted and is still derived from internal and external distribution deals, not organic or viral growth. The original My Yahoo of ten years ago received an incredible amount of traffic from the main Yahoo.com portal (and it still does), and the same went for iGoogle when it launched in 2005 – that little “iGoogle” link in the upper right hand corner of the standard Google.com page was the engine that drove (and continues to drive) traffic to the site. Comscore shows that even our friends at Netvibes derive most of their current traffic from one deal, the my.alot.com white-label page they did with MIVA, and didn’t experience any growth until that deal occurred last fall. In short, to really thrive in this category, you need big distribution deals with generous revenue share percentages. I do think that the number of traditional personalized start pages that can co-exist as standalone sites (not affiliated with a distribution network) is pretty small. In other words, maybe he should have stayed at Yahoo—or Google (where he also worked briefly). The other thing you’ve got to wonder is: What will the half-life of start pages be in a Friendfeed world? CrunchBase Information LiveUniverse Pageflakes Netvibes Dan Cohen Brad Greenspan Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 stats match what we have below). About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space – MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined – 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are. One thing to note on the data – it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size). Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes. Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old. A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a → 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 though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com. So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites. I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army. CrunchBase Information Netvibes Pageflakes iGoogle Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.). Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself. PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce. PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with → 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 apps in the form of widgets that you can drag around the page and place anywhere you want. With Ginger, Netvibes has a new Ajax user-interface that pops down a pane from the top whenever you want to add new widgets to your personlaized start page. It also now lets anyone create their own public “Netvibes Universe” page (before, these were just pages for brands). You can star items in any feed as a bookmarking feature, and there is now an activity stream so you can see what your friends are publicly starring and sharing as well. There is still no internal messaging system, however. I spoke with CEO Tariq Krim, who took me through the new features by phone from Paris. Overall, Ginger makes the Netvibes experience a lot smoother and finding widgets to add to your start page couldn’t be simpler (even though there are 110,000 widgets to choose from). The problem with Netvibes is that if you don’t get into the habit of going there as your start page first thing when you log on in the morning, you are liable to skip it altogether. I asked Krim when he will turn his widgets into Facebook or OpenSocial apps. That way, people could bring the widgets to where they already go to organize the Web for themselves, if that place does not happen to be Netvibes. Krim is working on this portability. Netvibes is part of OpenSocial and he’s had Bebo-like discussions with Facebook. “Both consortia would like us to be exclusive on their technology,” he sighs. (Sounds like the platform war is in full swing). Krim says he wants to work with both OpenSocial and Facebook. Ultimately,he doesn’t care where you consume his widgets. By the end of the first quarter, he plans on introducing widget ads in the form of micro-banners and text ads. The problem with widget ads, though, is that there are no standards. “We need the equivalent of OpenSocial for advertising,” he laments. If → 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, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, WordPress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: → 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 and the addition of some new partners. Flash and HTML support mean that widget development won’t only be more familiar to web developers, but also more easily support new applications such as video. Yahoo is also following through on some previous partnership announcements, making Netvibes UWA available as desktop widgets as well as adding the widgets from widget analytics services Clearspring and MuseStorm. CrunchBase Information MuseStorm ClearSpring Netvibes Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons. The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages. Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others. A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns – see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content. The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees. So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going. → 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
Customizable home page site Netvibes released a pre-beta version of their site for the iPhone earlier today at m.nv1.netvibes.com. This version of the site doesn’t look like much on a normal browser, but it definitely does the job on the iPhone. The already minimalized Netvibes is pared down even further for the iPhone to a single column of widgets. There are few graphics to speed load time. I use Netvibes as a quick hit RSS reader for my most important feeds. It does an even better job on the iPhone and I plan to bookmark a special Netvibes page with the 15 feeds I read multiple times per day. Keep a lookout on the Facebook blog this evening, too. Facebook PR says they will be announcing the iPhone version of the site shortly. Update: It’s launched. → Read More
People are clearly getting a little fatigued with all the new Facebook applications – so it’s nice to see something that actually works in reverse by pulling Facebook data into another application. Netvibes launched a cool new widget today that pulls certain Facebook data into your Netvibes page. Once installed, the widget show messages, pokes, friend requests, and other information. The widget also shows information on friends and has a search feature. I could install it but it won’t pull data from Facebook. Two of our interns were able to get it to work. Let us know if it works smoothly, or not, for you. What would be awesome is if Facebook (or a third party using the Facebook API) created a general widget to post this type of information on any website. → Read More
NetVibes is a really cool RSS/widget service that lets you make a drag-and-drop environment with plenty of AJAXy goodness. The nice folks at NetVibes gave us our own “Universe,” a customized home page where we can show folks what we love. Included on the page are some Flickr searches, a few RSS feeds from competing Web sites and lots of orange. Check it out. CrunchGear Universe → Read More
This afternoon Netvibes will announce the launch of Netvibes Universe, allowing users to create highly customized versions of Netvibes and publish them for public access. Netvibes has created 100 or so branded versions for the launch – users will be able to create these in about six weeks. In addition to making the page public, publishers can also highly customize their Universe page by adding their own CSS and HTML. The TechCrunch Universe page, featuring many of my favorite news feeds and a few widgets, is at Netvibes.com/TechCrunch. Additional Universe pages have been created for a number of artists (50 Cent, Ben Harper, Deftones, G-Unit, Mandy Moore, Moby, Pretty Ricky, and Snoop Dogg) and major news sites (CBS, CNN Money, Forbes.com, LATimes.com, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, TIME, Inc., USAToday and washingtonpost.com). A full list will be published here later today. Netvibes users can click and add any public page, or portion of a public page, to their own account and receive updates. Pageflakes also has public pages you can share with everyone or a select group of friends, but doesn’t support your own CSS. → Read More
Netvibes is throwing a party for 600 of their closest friends to celebrate the upcoming release of “Netvibes Universe” (look for our post on it soon). The party is free to attend, but you have to RSVP. Netvibes founder Tariq Krim agreed to give the last fifty invitations away to TechCrunch readers. If you’d like to attend, RSVP now at eco.netvibes.com/sfparty/. After the 50 slots are gone the site will start to create a waiting list. Please only RSVP if you fully intend to actually go. Otherwise you’ll be keeping someone else out. Date: April 16, 2007 Time: 9 pm Location: 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA 94105 Our previous coverage of Netvibes is here. → Read More
We’ve tracked a bunch of customizable, Ajax-rich home pages over the last couple of years. At one point it seemed like a new one was launching every week. New ones are still launching (here’s a promising one in beta), and the youngsters, Netvibes and Pageflakes, are showing the most energy and creativity. See, for example, Netvibe’s new effort to create cross platform widgets, and Pageflake’s really cool new video search/notification widget. Neither of those services, though, have grown large enough to be tracked by Comscore. The big old Internet giants own this space, and will continue to do so in the near future. That doesn’t mean they are keeping pace with the innovators, though. Netscape relaunched their personalized home page a week ago, and we panned it. Others, with a sense of nostalgia for the Netscape of yesteryear, cried foul. Their line of argument seems to be that since Netscape has been around for a long time it deserves special consideration. But people vote with their mouse, and Netscape has so little market share that it can’t lose much more and still be ranked by Comscore. Even when combined with the unique users of the My AOL service, they are dead last. January worldwide Comscore numbers show that the My Yahoo personalized home page has more users, with just over 50 million, than all of its competitors combined. All Yahoo has to do is remain competitive, and their massive user base will keep them at the top of the pile. Their recent enhancements are a good first step. Now they need to focus on integrating their Konfabulator desktop widget platform into My Yahoo as well – widget compatibility is an area where they are noticeably lagging Microsoft and Google. → Read More
The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of widgets for the various desktop widget platforms (Vista, Mac, Google, Yahoo) as well as online platforms like Pageflakes and Netvibes (and lots of others). The W3C has a working draft of a 1.0 Widget specification, which if adopted would make life easier for developers by requiring some standardization. However, the best solution for everyone would be a world where a widget works on every platform, no matter where it was originally created. Today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Netvibes founder Tariq Krim announced that their upcoming “Coriander” release will do just that. The new product will be called the Universal Widget API and will be available at eco.netvibes.com/uwa (this site is live now with a landing page, more information will be available next week). Once launched, any widget created for Netvibes, Krim says, will work on the Vista, Google, Mac and Opera platforms as well. Support for Yahoo Widgets and other platforms will follow soon after. A single javascript embed code will add the widget to any of the supported platforms. The code will recognize the platform and run the appropriate code for that platform within the widget. Once Coriander has launched, sites will be able to create and promote a single widget embed code for most platforms. Krim showed me Netvibes widgets running on a Mac as well as Google. Screenshots below. For people familiar with the look and feel of Netvibes modules/widgets, they will be immediately apparent. Krim also announced that Netvibes will be open sourcing the runtime at the same time as the platform launches, allowing anyone to expand the number of widget platforms supported. Expect smaller widget platforms to jump on this. Netvibes now claims 10 million active users. Krim says 1/3 of those users spend at least an hour per day on Netvibes, and 10% have Netvibes open “virtually the entire day.” Krim also announced that Netvibes will be supporting OpenID this year. → Read More
Mashup creation tool Dapper announced today that its users can now easily create new modules from any data source for placement in the popular start page Netvibes. Dapper is a company that’s either glorifying screen scraping or leading the charge towards data portability, depending on your perspective. I like it a lot. Working with Dapper to enable fast user creation of new modules is a nice competitive advantage for Netvibes. Our previous coverage of Netvibes is here and of Dapper here. Dapper first made the scene with the release of a tool called Blotter that displays any blog’s Technorati link data over time in a graph. The company has been on an innovation blitz lately, see for example the company’s recent proof of concept called Snag – a service that aggregates all your friends, updates and messages across LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Hi5. That was the first showcase of Dapper’s newly added support for incorporating data sources that require login and it’s just plain useful. Dapper users use a point and click interface to grab changes to data over time on any website. That data can then be delivered in any number of different formats, including RSS, iCal, Google Maps or many others. Dapper hopes that in addition to the relatively simple functionality it now brings to Netvibes, they hope to include more interactive features in their modules and extend this service out to more start pages and widget platforms as users request them and company’s approve. Dapper reports that they have much more in the works and a User Interface overhaul is near the top of their priorities. That’s great news as the site certainly needs one. Once the service becomes even easier to use, I expect to see Dapper implementations flourish around the web all the more. Update: Scott Matthews emailed me again after I posted this and reminded me once more that I could have and should have mentioned BittyBrowser as another way to bring Dapper built RSS feeds into Netvibes and many similar places. Matthews deserves a lot of credit as well for his work on making data portability a reality in the emerging web. → Read More
Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that is headquartered in Germany, is preparing to launch a major user interface change in the next day or two. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Christoph Janz and head designer Jeremy Baines about the new launch – you can listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch. A big part of the launch will be promotion of Pageflake’s recently added “publish” feature, where users can create pages with contact information, to-do lists, family pictures, etc. and either publish the content publicly, or share with a few friends. The site is also being completely redesigned (see screen shot below provided by company – sorry for the teaser). Pageflakes has taken a low profile approach when discussing numbers compared to their primary competitor, Netvibes. While Netvibes (which launched their own redesign a few days ago) has publicized their $15 million venture round as well as user growth (first 1 million and then more recently, 5 million), Pageflakes has not released user numbers or the size of their BenchMark financing. Regardless of the different marketing approaches of these companies, both are building a large and valuable user base and both have enough funding for the short and medium term. That’s good, because neither have generated any revenue yet. Given the extremely low burn rates of these and other new web startups, they have a while yet to figure out the best way to monetize their audience. → Read More
Netvibes quietly released an updated look and feel this evening. Read about the release on the Netvibes blog here and here. Key additions to the service include: Module search New web/blog /video search with results within netvibes Customization of look and feel MySpace module Netvibes says in their blog entry that the new release “will change the way you use and view the web” and includes user interface enhancements as well as a bunch of new modules. Putting the question of whether or not this update is as significant as the blog post suggests aside, Netvibes has certainly had a big impact on its users. They have collected over 5 million passionate users and $15 million in venture capital during its brief year of existence. Netvibes is one of the sites that has stuck with me as others come and go, and I visit it at least daily. I’ve created Netvibes modules for most of the web services I use and it has become the gateway to those services and sites. The site is fast, clean and contains to advertisements. Like Google search, the best thing about Netvibes is that it has no problem with me quickly leaving the site to take care of other business. And that’s why it’s earned my loyalty as a user. → Read More
NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Existing investor Index Ventures joined new investor Accel to lead the investment, which is one of the largest this year for a European company (Bebo, a UK based company raised a similar amount). The valuation was not disclosed. NetVibes is a personal ajax home page that we’ve covered since launch. Netvibes has seen tremendous growth, even against well funded competitors like Pageflakes, which took a large investment from Benchmark. The site now has over five million users and claims to have spent next to nothing on marketing. Their product has also been evolving nicely with the integration of their eco-system and the addition of Meebo IM injecting some community flavor. A previous seed round closed in March, including Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon). We understand that this investment will be mostly dedicated to setting up a team of business and technical collaborators (they actually started to do so) but also to upgrading their technical infrastructure, improving their product (a bit slower lately but being upgraded too) and establishing partnerships. NetVibes toughest challenges are starting now. They have enough traction in a young market to begin to monetize traffic – they just have to find the right way to do it without alienating users. NetVibes will also have to become mainstream which implies dedicated marketing efforts and relevant distribution deals to reach untapped, non-early-adopter audiences. They certainly have enough resources to implement their vision and take those challenges to the next level. Will NetVibes join other European based world class internet companies like Skype (an Index investment too) Bebo and Habbo? update 17/08: read also this post on NetVibes blog → Read More
San Francisco, CA
