Bold new startup: Jaiku

Jaiku is red-hot. The technology is sooo solid, and is going to be hard to copy. Twitter may be a little easier to use on the web, but Jaiku's mobile client is hands-down the most incredible mobile community app I've ever seen.

They've nailed it: finally managing to efficiently bring presence and community into my mobile's hitherto-dead address book.

I can see this becoming a gargantuan success very, very quickly. Particularly in Europe, where consumers tend to be far more mobile-savvy than in the US.

Congratulations to the Finnish team on a very well-engineered and well-conceived product!

If anyone wants to try it, you can connect with me here.

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Those Gregarious Americans

Many British newspapers now allow readers to post their comments on the stories.

One of the interesting things about this is that often, the majority of comments are left by American, not British readers.

I've noticed it in many articles, including this one that was emailed to me today (a scary piece in The Times on a 102-year-old who qualified for a 25-year mortgage!).

I had no idea that the UK newspapers had such a strong US audience. Or is it that the Americans are just more willing to express themselves to strangers?


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Barcelona startup eConozco bought by Xing

Many congratulations to Toni and his team at eConozco for selling their company! Seems like a smart move to me. eConozco is a Spanish business networking website, and this sector seems to be evolving to an environment with just a handful of very large, well capitalized players such as LinkedIn or eConozco's buyers, Xing (formerly called OpenBC). I first met Toni after stumbling upon another website his company operates, the delightful pricenoia. We met for a coffee soon after, and have kept in touch on and off over the last couple of years, following each other's progress. One thing that makes me happy to see this successful exit is that Toni and his team are self-funded and self-made. Now, they'll be able to focus more on their latest project, a mobile social network called festuc, which is taking off among young Spanish kids. Congrats!

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Quintura launches Kids site

Quintura today launched a dedicated search engine for kids- it's very cute, and uses their increasingly well-known 'clouds' to help navigation.

I really like this tool for searching- I wouldn't use it for a query where I know exactly what I want (google is king in that category), but I find it much better than google for queries that are a bit undefined, where what you want gets defined by what you find.

Quintura and my company, Properazzi, share the same investors, so I guess my opinion is technically biased. But for what it's worth, I do think it's a nice product, and the value of vertical-specific search engines like the one they launched today is not one that needs much argument to convince me :)


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Politicians: Ignore geeks at your peril!

Latest polls in the French presidential election show that Socialist Segolene Royal might actually be knocked out in the 1st round- with Sarkozy and Bayrou passing to the 2nd round.

As I recall, it was Sarkozy and Bayrou who made the effort to turn up to Loic Le Meur's LeWeb3 conference a few months ago.

Correlation? ;)

Link: FT.com / In depth - Poll surge unsettles French socialists’ bid

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An invisible business model for Wikipedia

Niki Scevak, founder of Homethinking, has proposed a *great* business model for Wikipedia that deserves to be spread around.

He's suggesting they sell their keyword/traffic data, which would presumably be both deep enough (top 10 visited website) and informative enough (which articles were read, and referring keywords) to be extremely valuable for marketing companies.

The beauty of the model is that it would keep everyone's privacy intact, and the Wikipedia product clean from visible advertising.

If anyone doubts that this information is interesting, check out the link that inspired Niki's post.

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A world where schoolteachers make $2 million/year

It's great that Steve Jobs has raised the issue of unions holding back quality of education, by preventing bad teachers from being fired. Robert Scoble adds that in addition, teachers should be paid better. Hey, Robert- want to see what the world looks like where good teachers makes as much as athletes or investment bankers? Just go check out South Korea. And soon, it may very well happen in the US. Kenneth Gronbach, writer of a fascinating blog on demographic trends and marketing, points out that the US is about to face a big change in supply and demand for education. Just as millions of additional Generation Y students enter the school system, millions of Baby Boom teachers will be retiring, unreplaced by the much smaller Generation X. The result, to build on Ken's piece, should lead to fierce competition between students for declining supply of quality education. The pressure will rise for good teachers will start to be paid much, much more than mediocre ones. Education is one of the last gargantuan service industries that has yet to restructure for a global, post-industrial world. Competition among suppliers, pay according to merit, radical adoption of technology to improve delivery of service...all these and more are just waiting to happen.

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Social network for dead people

Geni, a new geneology website, is certainly growing virally. I signed up a week ago just to try it, and added a couple family members names and emails....today I get an email update saying that my family tree is now up to 84 people! Which is great, except that it's going to rapidly run out of steam because the most recently added folks (great-grandparents, etc.) don't have emails and are unlikely to contribute any further names to our tree because they're all dead. I'm guessing that means Geni is a great way to spread a very wide, but thin, layer of geneology across the world. But to go back more than 1 generation, it will have to fall back on the same old tools and techniques that others before it have relied upon. Or am I missing something?

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The case for more video games!

So, while taking a break earlier I found these disturbing articles:

Atlanta cops throw down and bust Oxford historian for jaywalking (via reddit)

and

Security guard shoots at woman who took library book (via Drudge)

Seems to me some people really should be acting out their Rambo instincts on an Xbox rather than in real life provoked by people's everyday trivial infractions....

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Beta-testing Venice Project

I gave the Venice Project a try last week, and generally found it to be pretty good although the lack of any interesting content means that I hardly use it.

The UI is pretty hot, though. Have to give those ex-Skype guys credit for making their apps so dead simple and intuitive.

Anyway, I just received two additional beta-testing invites. If anyone's interested in trying it, leave me a comment or send me an email.

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