This is quite amusing. It seems that the interview I gave to ReadWriteWeb a few days ago have stirred up quite some emotions. Believe it or not, Linux Journal calls Maxthon The Real Firefox-Killer...
For the real challenger comes not from Microsoft directly; instead, it’s from a new browser that uses IE’s rendering engine, Trident, but which is produced completely independently of the company. This means that it can offer all the "benefits" of 100% compatibility with what is still the dominant Internet browser, together with a host of real improvements - some of which go beyond even Firefox. This new competitor is called Maxthon..
Interesting take. I couldn’t agree more with the author. Besides the fact that we are not fighting any browser war. We are just a very good alternative. There is plenty of space for all of us, just like there is a market for more than Ford and Volvo..
BTW, read the comments – quite interesting..
Maxthon for Linux anybody?
Technorati Tags: Maxthon, Linux, IE7, Browsers, Linux Journal, Firefox, Technology
Today I had the pleasure to have lunch with Tangos (aka Chen Huan), the editor of the Chinese “Techcrunch” (but without the commercial tags
) China Web 2.0 Review in Beijing. Chen is a product manager at the Chinese Web 2.0 search engine/portal Qihoo (that just raised $25M from US investors) at day and blogger by night. I have been following the development of his blog ever since it’s inception and it has become an important source of information for me on what is cooking on the Chinese Web scene.
Except that it is always nice to meet up with a fellow blogger it was great to hear Tangos view on what’s hot and what’s not on the Chinese Web scene. When I asked Tangos what if there was anything new he found particularity interesting right now, the answer was no. In fact, although Web2.0 companies are mushrooming all over in China, it seems that there is nothing really new happening this year as opposed to last year. That very much seems to echo the sentiments back in the Valley and outside China at large.
When I asked him what he personally found most exciting, he mentioned Douban – the book, music, movie, travel and blog review site.
I know I have mentioned it several times before but I can warmly recommend China Web2.0 Review.
Riya‘s founder and CEO Munjal Shah, has written a fantastic account for the launch of Riya. The first post “Episode 1: March 21 6am PST to March 28 6am” is a great account of all the ups and downs a start-up goes through during its launch. I think that many of us really can identify ourselves with his story. No sleep, a lot of nervs, stress and satisfaction. Shel thinks he should write a book about it. Why not? It’s really good. Waiting for Episode 2..
My good friend and Maxthon partner, Morten Lund (early Skype-investor) & his team at LundKenner has just made a strategic investment in Israeli Start-up Spearcast. I am very happy of being responsible for making this happen. Morten will take a seat on Spearcast’s Board of Directors (I am already on Spearcast’s Advisory Board). Spearcast, recently launced a service called Palore. Palore lets you call business for free, rate them and share them with others in a very smart way. Spearcast was founded by very talented Israeli entrepreneurs Hanan Lifshitz and Erez Chochva. Read more about the investment here (in Hebrew sorry). I see great potential for this service and I am delighted that Morten and I (again for the second time) will be partners in crime.
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Screenshot of Palore |
Boardtracker specializes on tracking discussion forums. I think that is a great idea. While we have endless trackers for blogs etc, many conversations today still take place in forums and not on blogs.
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
Isolatr – is a big laugh in the face of all the Web2.0 companies. It is consists of 2 pages, the front page and a great FAQ. I love this stuff + Go Flock Yourself. They show the real value of many of these companies and puts them in their right place. Love the name too. I should add though, that there are a few gold corns out there – but you have to sort out the rubbish first. Via Ouriel.
The Personal Bee is yet another news website, getting ready for launch of its aunch of its do-it-yourself news service. According to the company it self it is:
“a social media company that believe that the combination of RSS, smart analytics, and user collaboration will lead to a better way for you to find news on the topics you care most about”.
Hm, what does that really mean? It means that, users create and organize portals around topics like Headline News, Web 2.0 or Travel, Technolgy and Wine, for instance. Readers can then themselves subscribe to various existing “bees”, and can also create their own feeds around specific topics, keeping their portal private or letting others subscribe ( I guess that it is here that the company becomes a “social media company “). All the information is aggregated by the company’s software from various sites and blogs, but relies on portal owners, or “beekeepers,” to act as editors – vetting information as they go.
In general this is not really something new and the online news space is already getting very crowded. However, letting other portal owners act as editors is a very intersting idea. It reminds me of a discussion I had some time ago with the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle John Oppedahl. He also believed that the news media as we know it is about to change, but the overflow of information is just too big handle. John meant that the need for news editors will be grow even stronger, and that we more than ever will need somebody to skim it all out for us, or make sense of it all.
I personally believe that the days of the big portals our counted and the direction we are moving towards are very rich personal, edited portals (not a la My Yahoo etc though) where we can share parts of the content or all of it with others.
Anyway, Personal Bee is plans to generate revenue through advertising, and is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures . As a side note I can just say, that the future for online advertising looks very bright…(if anyone every doubted that).
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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