Yannick Laclau

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was in Madrid this week for the ExpoManagement conference, and mentioned us in his speech. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

…There’s an interesting example of this right here in Spain. It’s a real estate service, based in Barcelona, that’s called “Properazzi”. Say you are interested in buying a new home. You know the general location, and the approximate size and price range of the house you would like to buy. And, like most of us, you own a mobile phone. This service provides an Internet-based search engine that can quickly help you find the property you’re looking for.

There also is a start-up called “Widsets,” which it just so happens was created by Nokia. It’s an Internet service that allows people to create and direct personalized feeds of web content right into their mobile device. So you now can create your customized search, connecting you to the most up-to-date information on the continent’s largest database of property listings, and receive it directly into your mobile device, wherever you are. You never have to open an Internet browser, and you never have to turn on your desktop PC…

This is related to the interesting work we’ve been doing with Widsets, a Nokia spinoff that has a really innovative platform for mobile widgets.

Yesterday Properazzi came in 3rd out of a pool of 250 companies in a competition to find innovative European web2.0 startups. The final was held in Bilbao; although it was raining, we were inside the fabulous Guggenheim museum for the presentations.

It was a fun trip, and congrats to the 1st and 2nd place teams from Sclipo and 5min. They’re both video sites focused on skills, but have very different products and target markets.

All three winners come from cities on the beach with great food and climate (2x Barcelona and Tel Aviv); was the jury making a statement favoring a kind of lifestyle?

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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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?

Update: Ok, Scott Faber comments below that I may have jumped the gun in judging Ether so quickly. So I’ve gone and had a closer look, and I’ve changed my opinion. The difference with Keen is actually very important, and this implementation could really be very powerful. Scott’s PayPal/eBay analogy was helpful in communicating the difference.

My main critique at this point is that everyone has to pass via the same 800 number. Why not give each person a distinct number (or at least let them choose)?

Oh, and kudos to Scott for reaching out to me, and probably many other bloggers who misinterpreted the Ether product as a Keen rehash.

I just saw on TechCrunch that super-stealth Ether to launch tonight….

Things come full circle for this company: they started as Keen, then became Ingenio, and now are launching Ether, which turns out to be exactly what Keen originally was!

I suppose it’s a measured risk. There are plenty of businesses that are working today that would never have worked 5 years ago because of growth in the meantime of broadband penetration, comfort with ecommerce, etc.

So why not bring back Keen from the dustbin? But then again, maybe there was a reason it failed in the first instance. Ingenio should probably just stick to it’s booming, solid business of pay-per-call.

Om (and many others) are talking about how European fiber to the home networks are starting to pop up everywhere: plans have been announced for Amsterdam, Paris, and now Vienna. ADSL2+ is everywhere, triple-play is cheap, and incumbents are under massive competition. Broadband Europe is on fire compared to the US.

But I’ve just returned from the US, where I was astonished to see ads for mobile phone plans around $40 per month for 1,500 minutes! Good luck finding a deal like that anywhere in Europe. Yeah, yeah… US penetration is still lower, Americans don’t SMS as much, etc. But the fact is that American mobile telephony is far, far cheaper than in Europe- and price is the most important attribute, so in my book that makes the American market far more advanced than Europe’s.

Funny, because six years ago it was the opposite: Europe was easily ahead of the US in mobile, and the US easily ahead of Europe in Internet access.

Link:  Om Malik on Broadband : » Now Vienna Plans a Fiber Network

sorry for the absence in blogging, and hope everyone is having a great start to 2006!

To celebrate my first post of the year, I’ve finally made my long-overdue switch from TypePad to WordPress. A number of reasons for this change, but the biggest has to do with community- the WP community is much more active, creative, and helpful with each other than the TP folks.

Anyway, look forward to some good posting in the coming weeks. Lots of interesting things happening

Just getting the blog registered on Technorati.

Technorati Profile

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

From the Sunday Times: Centrica looks to ditch telecoms arm in strategy u-turn.

And from the same article:

John Caudwell, billionaire owner of the
Phones 4U retail chain, has kicked off the sale of his fixed-line
telecoms business, Caudwell Communications, which operates in the
residential market as Homecall. It is set to fetch up to £100m

Hmm….long shot speculation here, but could it be that these smart folks see the gathering pace of the telco Scorched Earth stategy (see previous post) and are getting out of the way while they still can?