August 14th, 2007

Netvibes For iPhone Available Now

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. → Read More

August 2nd, 2007

Netvibes Launches Facebook Widget; It's A Little Buggy

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. → Read More

June 18th, 2007

Introducing the NetVibes CrunchGear Universe

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

April 16th, 2007

Netvibes Launches Universe: Customized Public Pages

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… → Read More

April 10th, 2007

Netvibes San Francisco Party: TechCrunch Readers Get Last 50 Invites

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… → Read More

March 13th, 2007

A Little Perspective On Ajax Home Pages

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… → Read More

February 21st, 2007

Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility

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… → Read More

November 22nd, 2006

Make Your Own Netvibes Modules With Dapper

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… → Read More

October 3rd, 2006

Pageflakes 2.0 To Launch

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… → Read More

September 30th, 2006

New Look For Netvibes

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… → Read More

August 13th, 2006

Netvibes secures a $15 million investment

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… → Read More

July 26th, 2006

Netvibes adds Meebo IM

Netvibes, one of the leading ajax desktops online, announced today that they have added a module for Meebo, a cross-platform web IM system. Netvibes is a great way to make RSS visually appealing and usable, but the inclusion of Meebo in the platform takes things to the next level in terms of interactivity. People who use multiple computers can now use any terminal to read their feeds in NetVibes… → Read More

July 3rd, 2006

The Supernova 12

Over 100 startups applied to present their companies at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference last week. Twelve were selected and had a chance to launch their new products to an audience of hundreds. I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below. Attensa Ether lifeio… → Read More

May 31st, 2006

NetVibes gets an ecosystem

Paris/London based NetVibes, which provides a personalized Ajax homepage, released significant upgrades yesterday, including new plugins and community sharing features. Tariq Krim, NetVibes CEO took us through this new version. First they have released 2 new plugins accessible in the default feed menu. One is displaying hottest digg news and the other helps you monitor Ebay activities. They have… → Read More

March 22nd, 2006

Netvibes to Announce Seed Financing Today

Netvibes, a very popular Ajax home page product that I said was a Web 2.0 Company I couldn’t live without, will announce seed funding by Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon). The size of the round was not disclosed. Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes, and the service is… → Read More

December 30th, 2005

Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do… → Read More

September 16th, 2005

Netvibes – Personal homepage

Netvibes, a project started in France by Florant Fremont, is the latest web-app based on the idea of personalized homepages and like some others (like Start and Google’s personal homepage), it is powered by some nicely developed Ajax. Their goal is best put in their own words, so quoting their blog post about the launch on the 8th september, The aim of it is to provide a place on the… → Read More