Björn Jeffery

Google acquires Jaiku

Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

(source)

Jaiku, one of my favourite internet services, was just acquired by Google. Congratulations to Jyri and the rest of the team! And the mist clears slightly on the Gphone front. It´s very interesting news, but too early for me to have an analysis worth while. Let’s just let this one sink in for a bit.

tags technorati : jaiku google acquisition

tags bloggar.se: jaiku, google, uppköp

As I’ve been challenged by both Jocke and Sorosh regarding the title as most transparent CEO, I have to step my game up a bit.

Apart from Jaiku and Dopplr, I’m planning to release my calendar (iCal) and my todos (Remember the Milk). Unfortunately the iCal-feed seems to contain everything I’ve ever written it in – and not just the upcoming events (is there a way of fixing this?). This means that I have to go through all my events in order to make sure that nothing sensitive is published. I can be transparent, but I can’t assume that all my clients want to be. I’m working on that one.

On all future events this could be arranged fairly simply, but on the other hand – what is the point of saying that I have a meeting with a someone if I only name their company name, or the persons first name? That would be like phoning somebody’s secretary and finding out he/she was “in a meeting”. Not very transparent. On the other hand I can’t force it upon people either.

It’s interesting, but a bit tricky all this. Any thoughts on what approach to take here?

tags technorati : transparency radicaltransparency

tags bloggar.se: transparens

I’m a guest lecturer at the University of Lund this week. The theme is online journalism, a subject that interests me a lot. Apart from the irony of me lecturing at the same institution that I once planned to attend, a lot of interesting thoughts have come up regarding journalism. Web TV for instance. I had to write it down.

It seems some have misunderstood the whole point of TV, or moving images, on the web. It’s not the fact that it can be done, and it´s not that people have suddenly opened their eyes to it. It’s that TV on the web can do things that regular TV can’t.

So why is so much of Web TV just a cheap, badly edited excuse for not owning a real TV channel? Because the people doing it are old media. And they tend to look at other old media to try to understand what’s going on. Bad idea, considering that most old media sucks.

Here’s five aspects I thought of that makes Web TV superior, and that should be used more often:

1. It’s on demand. Nuff said.

2. It’s endless. Regular TV lacks the space, and therefor the versatility, of publishing alternate takes, edits, or angles.

3. It’s interactive. Reader commentary – text, chat or video response – adds a new dimension to the conversation.

4. It’s fast. Update as often as possible.

5. It’s there. You need a semi-modern mobile phone – that’s it. The possibility to catch moving images has never been better. You can, and should be, unique.

tags technorati : television webtv tv media

tags bloggar.se: webb-tv, tv, media

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I will be holding my first Pecha Kucha presentation in Gothenburg. The topic is Jetset for all and is loosely based on this blog entry that I wrote a few weeks ago. If you’re around, please come by! It’s free! 19.30 at Nefertiti is the place to be.

Likemind has exploded and is now in 36 cities worldwide. Crazy! Tomorrow, Friday, I will be attending the Stockholm version, but the Malmö one is on as usual. I hope to see you there!

Now this is normally not a blog that covers too much news, but this was to interesting to pass on. At Techcrunch 40, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced that they will be starting a fund to support Facebook developers. The sum of money will range from $25 000-$250 000 and the only condition so far is that it is spent on developing their company within Facebook.

IMHO, this is a brilliant idea. When I held my presentation at Stanford I spoke of eight types of internet currency. Money was the last one, and Revver´s rev-sharing was my example then. Paying for content or action is somehow the final incentive as it is the most common form of it outside the internet (salary).

Setting up a fund that supports developers is just a nicer and more interesting way of doing that. Also, the buzz around each payout could become the same as major VCs investing in startups. This is a truly intelligent initiative.

tags technorati : facebook fbfund markzuckerberg fund vc internetcurrency

tags bloggar.se: facebook, fbfund, mark zuckerberg, riskkapital, internetvaluta, fond

70 years with television and suddenly the TV channels gets how people watch it. Using several channels, not just the one that they happen to own.

It started this summer with Schibsted´s acquisition of TV.nu, a fairly basic site that lists what television programmes are on. Following this, both TV4 and Kanal5 decided to take on a new approach to what a television site could, and should, contain. Information about television – no matter what channel or torrent tracker it may be on.

Check the screen shot above – Kanal5s top story is about the rivalling channel SVT. TV4´s TVplaneten lists SVT1, SVT2 and TV3 before their own channels. Just like they should.

People that are interested in TV are interested in good programmes. Where these programmes are shown is secondary. Imagine that it only took 70 years to work that one out.

tags technorati : schibsted television tv4 svt kanal5 tv.nu tvplaneten

tags bloggar.se: schibsted, tv, tv4, svt, kanal5, tvplaneten, tv.nu

I held a presentation about the future of e-commerce at Webbdagarna Malmö today. It’s in Swedish and it builds strange with Slideshare, but you’ll get the picture. Also, Fredrik and I set up a backchannel in Jaiku that you can find here.

Here you go:

tags technorati : e-commerce presentation webbdagarna internetworld

tags bloggar.se: e-handel, presentation, webbdagarna, internetworld

Stockholm University:

Create a Facebook account and make three friends.

Stanford University:

Create a Facebook application.

No wonder we’re not getting anywhere.

While I was gone three similar, but interesting, pieces of news turned up Bloglines. DN, Aftonbladet and Sydsvenskan are planning communities with the Josh XCAP platform.

It’s slightly strange that they all chose the same system, but fair enough – that’s not the interesting part. What is, is the choice to start building their own communities at a time like this. The logic follows along the lines of the classic protectionism that is often shown by media companies like these. Everyone wants to own their readers. If they instead focused on producing what the readers actually wanted, and made sure it could be placed where the readers already were, perhaps success would come eventually.

With this is mind, it might be better to produce a few intelligent and value-adding widgets for MySpace and Facebook instead. It would be considerably cheaper as well. Through portioning out your content into chunks and pieces that fit into current social frameworks, you are not as affected by the lack of loyalty shown by many community members. Instead, you can be versatile enough to change along with the times and move wherever the people may be going.

All communities aren’t doomed of course – even if Facebook and MySpace are doing a good job of eliminating quite a few competitors. But to be successful in that space you need to find an interesting enough niche, dedicate a lot of resources and/or simply design a web-app so well that it’s simply irresistible. I just don’t think any of the aforementioned newspapers will manage that.

(Transparency: We do consultancy work for Sydsvenskan but are not involved in the above project.)

A few other things I should have blogged about earlier:
* Sydsvenskan released their first original podcast today. Although we haven’t been part of the production, the idea originally came from us over a year ago. We thought HippHipp! was the perfect partner as they both have a strong connection to Sydsvenskans coverage area Skåne, and also have become national icons through their tv-series.

* “Who cares about what people think?” Fantastic (or tragic, depending on how you look at it) words from Anna Serner, the new CEO of The Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

* DI released their new design today, and kept the frames… OMG FRAMES!

* Olof wrote the entry I was thinking of writing myself. We’re ditching Plazes, sorry guys.

tags technorati : communities newspapers internetstrategy

tags bloggar.se: communities, dagstidningar, tidningar, internetstrategi