Yesterday I had the honor to sit in on a meeting arranged by CRV, with Naval Ravikant, founder of Epinions, and a number of other start-ups, as well as a former VC -guy with a dozen investment, and currently back in the start-up business again as founder and CEO for Vast. Naval was invited by CRV do give a Web 2.0 overview – and I must say that it was the best presentation and overview I have ever heard about the topic. Straight to the point, what works, why it works, when to invest, and what’s next (which of course nobody has any clue of…).
Naval’s current company Vast, also had its launch yesterday and looks very promising indeed. Vast is a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses.
In more detail Naval says that Vast:
- Is crawling the web and large parts of the blogosphere with a general crawler, similar to the ones operated by Yahoo!, Google, Ask, MSN, and Gigablast.
- The crawler activates forms, and digs deep to find even dynamic data
- It automatically recognize classifieds listings – currently cars for sale, job postings, and personals profiles, and extract and normalize the surrounding metadata (make, model, price, mileage, salary, location, title, age, gender, etc.).
Currently, Vast have, according to Naval, some of the largest databases anywhere, of over 15 Million classified listings across these three categories, automatically extracted and structured with no human oversight, from nearly 50,000 web sites and blogs.
That is pretty amazing…Ebay watch out? BTW, anyone can steal the site…
Tags: Vast Tags: Naval Ravikant Tags: Epinions Tags: VC Tags: CRV Tags: Web2.0 Tags: Crawling Tags: Classifieds Tags: Yahoo Tags: Google Tags: Ask Tags: MSN Tags: Gigablast Tags: Search Tags: Ebay Tags: Google
Piper Jaffray held their third Annual China Internet & Technology Conference in Beijing last week. From the discussions & presentations held at the conference, the following key take aways emerged:
1. The economy is less of a risk, compared with last year
2. Leaders are emerging within the sector
3. Companies are more realistic about market opportunity and margin leverage
4. Regulation is helping moderate growth rate, preventing potential bubbles
5. New areas are emerging in blogs, social networking, etc.
6. Adoption of advertising and online medium by small businesses is increasing
7. Local companies enjoy home-grown advantage
Focus Media and Ctrip are emerging as leaders, Baidu and TOM Group as well. Baidu is dominating search and Google will have a difficult and uphill struggle in challenging Baidus domination. Online advertising is expecting to grow 35-40% during 2006 (an amazing oppertunity here). What I find particulariy interesting is the new areas that are emerging in blogs and social networking. According to Piper Jaffray, blogging is the big new trend catching on very rapidly. They also believe that it will continue to grow, and the existing players such as Bokee, Blog CN, Sina and surprise: MSN Spaces are likely to be market leaders. Other rapidly growing companies are: online match making, phone agencies and travel search engines.
Against this background I must say that Maxthon is very well positioned in China, we are already driving a huge percentage of Baidu’s search traffic, we are the second biggest browser in China and our user growth in China (as well as outside of) are just exploading.
Tags: Piper Jaffray Tags: China Tags: Internet Tags: Technology Tags: Focus Media Tags: Ctrip Tags: Baidu Tags: Tom Online Tags: Advertising Tags: BlogsTags: Social networks Tags: Bokee Tags: Blog CN Tags: Sina Tags: MSN Spaces Tags: Maxthon
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