A fairly pointless but fun survey asks: If the British could follow any figure from history on Twitter, who would it be? The top answer, apparently, is ex-war time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, a man who was renown for making speeches that far exceeded 140 characters.
Jesus, who isn’t short of followers outside of the Twittersphere, came in at a surprising second.
The poll, which surveyed 2000+ people across the UK, was carried out by YouGov on behalf of Prospect Magazine. It tested the views of the 11% of British people who are estimated to use Twitter, about 5.5m, and compared them to the rest of the country. The conclusion?
Here are some random upcoming events
• CloudStorm event in Paris, December 1
CloudStorm provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors. It is free for attendees to go to and it is paid for content – i.e. each sponsor/vendor pays for their 5 min presentation slot. These are not really startups paying to pitch, but it is actual larger CloudComputing vendors paying to promote themselves to an audience of probably startups and others. So from that point of view it could be useful. The presentations are followed by a panel discussion with visitors invited to a mini expo and networking party.
[UK] London-based Mendeley, which calls itself “the Last.fm of research”, has announced that its reached somewhat of a milestone today – claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.
That’s pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley’s database continue to grow at the current rate they’ll overtake Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the world’s largest online research paper database, in April 2010.
This is why I love this medium. You put something out there. Sometimes you have all the holes pluggged. Sometimes you don’t. But blog comments and latterly, Twitter conversations, can be just incredible, and go on to form a patchwork of great information around a story – even creating new stories.
That’s what’s happening on the comments on my post yesterday about the @Dinner_Guest Twitter user who is tweeting like he’s a murderer in Brighton. I figured it was interesting enough to do a quick post on it. Maybe I’ve been sucked into a dumb marketing campaign, maybe I haven’t – I’m not overly worried. I’d rather put something out there that I think is interesting than not, and I knew for sure that in this case the community out there would be great at looking into this.
German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING. Burda already has positions in Glam Media, the GameDuell startup and Zooplus.
Hamburg based business social network XING continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year. Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million).
[UK] Today in London a couple of hundred delegates turned up to Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference to jaw-jaw over the nature and impact of business and society of, well, Twitter. But as various startups and social media pundits took to the stage to debate the mostly positive impact Twitter will have, a much darker side has appeared on the social site in the last few days.
@Dinner_Guest is tweeting some extremely dark stuff. Most if it is decidedly not suitable for work, and read like passages from the novel about a killer, American Psycho. Of course, this is no surprise – Twitter is big enough now to attract all sorts of crazy people.
Hacker News, the now influential news aggregator about tech startups born out of Ycombinator, has been of huge value to a community not only keen to learn but to track the latest development on the Web.
But the conversation there is distinctly Silicon Valley oriented. So I am excited to learn of a new aggregator called Uni Startups. Clearly it’s aimed at people creating startups while they are at university, but being built on Slinkset, it’s already up and running and pulling in stories. It’s also got a widget you can embed, which I’ve done below.
[UK] It seems that the iPhone has all the bases covered, including those of the UK’s Royal Navy which is using Apple’s iconic device to help put potential new engineering recruits through their paces.
A dedicated iPhone app, developed in partnership with the Central Office of Information (COI) and creative agency Marvellous, presents those interested in joining the navy with a set of challenges that simulate real-world situations. Dubbed ‘The Royal Navy Engineer Officer Challenge’, five interactive missions are on offer – drawing from realistic Royal Navy training tasks – which utilise some of the iPhone’s hardware features, such as the touch screen (obviously) and accelerometer.
[Spain] Though I’m dying to browse around and mingle at FICOD, “Feria Internacional de Contenidos Digitales”, or International Digital Content Fair for you, a friend told me it would be nearly criminal not to at least mention what we have going on here in Madrid for the next three days (see program).
[Sweden] Movie-streaming service Voddler (the so called ”Spotify for movies”) has received about 3.4 million Euros (35 million SEK) in funding from a group of private investors. The money will supposedly go to developing the service.
Voddler has chosen to not to give out any info about the investors or how large their share in the company will be. The company has about 50 share holders to date. One of them is Deseven Capital where Voddler’s CEO Marcus Bäcklund is a partner.
[UK] Yep. You read that right. News has broke that the BBC News’ newly appointed Social Media Editor hasn’t signed up to Twitter prior to today. In other words, he’s a newbie. As a result, let’s just say that there’s a bit of a Twitter storm brewing.
Social Networking continues to be the killer app for mobile and Twitter is no exception. Loved by both handset makers and mobile networks alike the microblogging service is seen as a potential driver in selling more expensive handsets and those potentially lucrative data plans. It’s therefore not all that surprising to learn that Orange and Twitter have formed what’s being described as a “pan-European partnership”, although for now UK customers-only are to benefit.
Starting today, Orange UK customer can send and receive tweets by SMS to and from their followers, and in a world first, also share photos on Twitter via the carrier’s Multmedia Messaging Service (MMS) as part of its newly launched ‘Snapshot‘ service – sort of like an Orange-branded TwitPic or similar sites. This additional Twitter functionality is to be included in customers’ existing plans and won’t cost any more aside from standard charges for sending an SMS or MMS outside of any included bundle.
[UK] A new mobile payment service in the UK aims to lower the barriers to paying for content online, and in doing so, help bloggers, musicians, and other content owners generate much needed revenue.
GoPayforit lets website visitors make payments ranging from 25p to £10 via their mobile phone, charged to either their monthly phone bill or debited from their Pay As You Go (pre-pay) credit. The service is based on the industry-wide mobile payment system Payforit, which is backed by all of the major UK mobile networks. Talking of those (greedy) networks, the amount that content owners will receive after GoPayForit takes their cut can vary greatly as each operator charges a different amount per transaction.
Payment examples provided by the company include purchasing tracks or videos from a band’s website, subscribing to a blog or donating to a charity.
Tonight is the launch of the project to raise money for the charity Take Heart India, which teaches IT skills to blind and disabled people in India and helps them get skills that will employ them for the rest of their life, taking them out of the cycle of poverty. You can find out more about an LDNnudetech event to support them below, but I just want to say something first about startups, entrepreneurs and the Spirit of Punk. Yes.
This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week. This actually started out life as an initiative by the UK government, internally to the UK. But cleverly they have extended it globally and brought on partners. So all over the world there are events going on to promote the idea of entrepreneurship.
At the same time, governments all over the world are bailing out banks. Either that, or the banks are allowed to fail, taking startups and small businesses with them. It’s an impossible situation, but that’s what’s happening. Many say we are in for even more pain. Already millions are unemployed across the planet. None of this is going away anytime soon.
We’ll be running our own TechCrunch half-day and party event on the subject of Realtime in December (“Christmas Crunch: It’s a Realtime Holiday” £45, tickets here). But that’s a way off, and in the meantime, tomorrow in London the 140 Characters Conference from the US hits these shores. It will be at the O2 Indigo and is being put on by the long-time tech veteran Jeff Pulver.
At the last minute we’ve secured three free tickets to the event (I’ll be there moderating a panel on venture capital and realtime), so we’re delighted to give these away to anyone commenting on this post saying they want to go, and why. These are normally £425. So get commenting. We’ll pick someone randomly.
It’s my great pleasure to announce that I’m going to be joined by Steve O’Hear on TechCrunch Europe. Some of you may have noticed Steve’s work appear on the blog over the last month. Steve will be Contributing Editor, and will be working closely with me on our continuing coverage of the tech scene in Europe and acting as my “wingman”. In fact, I did try to convince him that Wingman was a great title, but for some reason he preferred something with the word Editor in it. I can’t think why.
Steve has some awesome credentials. Aside from starting up the well-regarded independent gadget blog last100 (formerly a part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network) which he’ll continue to write, he’s written for some of the best titles out there including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and of course ReadWriteWeb. In particular he wrote the excellent ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’ from 2006 to 2008. And to top it all off he previously wrote and directed the documentary film ‘In Search of the Valley’, which interviewed many leading Web 2.0 people in Silicon Valley and was released in September 2006. It was highly recommended by Mike Arrington, FYI.
[Germany] Today I should have received my first edition of Niuu, a personalised print newspaper comprised of articles taken from various blogs and newspapers. Delivery time should be between 4 AM and 6 AM so that people can read it over breakfast. Niiu has contracts with mostly German newspapers like Bild, Frankfurter Rundschau and Handelsblatt but also with the Washington Times and The International Herald Tribune.
Readers can use the Niiu website to customise which page of a newspaper they want to read in the morning. Local news from Berliner Morgenpost can easily be combined with Sports from Bild and the New York Times’ frontpage with just a few clicks.
[Germany] It must be great to be in the social games business. Apparently anyone can jump on the bandwagon, even latecomers and copycats. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, a $43 million investment at Playdom and €5 million ($7.5m) additional funding for Wooga, comes the fourth investment in the last week: The Samwer brothers’ copy of social games giant Zynga, called… wait for it folks… Plinga. Sound familiar? The clone has been funded with an undisclosed amount. Now that’s what I call an investment spree.
So Belle De Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCD.
From her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born.
Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her identity. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this week when Belle herself chose to out herself, granting an interview to Knight, one of her harshest critics.
A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.
There’s just one problem: it isn’t.
READ ON
As any industry analyst will tell you, since its two journalists were returned from North Korea, Current.tv has been woefully overstaffed. The company simply doesn’t require that many employees to edit YouTube clips for its audience of jobless hipster doucheballs who have fallen asleep in front of the television.
And so it wasn’t entirely surprising this week when TechCrunch reported on a ‘bloodbath‘ at the company, with 80 people being laid-off across all departments.
Current’s COO Joanna Drake Earl (who is herself three separate people) insisted to Leena that the layoffs aren’t a ‘cost-cutting measure’ but rather a ‘shift in programming strategy’. In most other companies, this would be classic corporate bullshit, but in Current’s case Joanna, Drake and Earl might actually have a point. After all, by creating 80 new unemployed people – unemployed people who actually know what Current is – they’ve just doubled the target audience for their programming. How’s that for a convenient truth?
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