3G iPhone craze, this is unbelievable

This is unbelievable. Engadget reports that folks have already formed a line at 5th Avenue Apple store. Apparently, these guys want to break a world record of sort for standing in line a week or so earlier. Huh! Isn’t that weird. A week earlier for a mobile phone. Well, looks like July 4th long weekend seems to be boring for these folks to do something interesting.
Pics courtesy, Engadget

VC's love Nimbuzz, give $15 million

Holland based Nimbuzz , a mobile VoIP startup has raised a $15 million second round led by South African media firm Naspers’ Myriad International Holdings (MIH) digital arm. Currently it supports more than 22 brands and over 500 models. It supports different clients for PC, Mobile and widgets for social networking. So far, the company has raised a total of $25 million dollars. The new money shall be used to support Windows Mobile, Phone and Android.

Here are some of the features that nimbuzz Mobile supports:
• Call
• Chat/Chatrooms/Groupchat
• Text messaging
• Share photos, music, video
• Send voice messages
• Manage address book
• Set status
• Buzz (get friends online)

The list of IM clients it supports is very impressive. From nimbuzz mobile client, users can interact with Google Talk, Skype, AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, jabber, MySpace and facebook. Nimbuzz is not lone warrior in this arena, there are quite a few startups like Fring, Mig33, TruPhone that support similar features.

It has close to a million users with 5000 users signing up everyday. That’s impressive. However, not sure what is their revenue model. It’s kind of interesting how they could raise $15 million dollars without any solid revenue generating strategy. Apparently they claim to have deals with 10 major social networking and 3 mobile operators. That kind of explains the VC’s interest towards nimbuzz.

Off late, we are seeing lot of startups that want to play the social media aggregator and unified interface role. I guess by the time Yahoo OneConnect is made public, we would have tones of other clones that pretty much do the same thing with a small twist here and there. The potential in these apps are huge and iam sure there is room for multiple players. If you guys know of any mobile clients that does the same thing, let me know.

Top news for this week

Nokia acquires Symbian
Gizmo5 to use jajah platform
Microsoft to acquire powerset
Microsoft acquired Mobicomp
The master(Bill Gates) bows out
Microsoft acquires mobile data backup and restore company MobiComp
30 must have firefox plugins

Jaxtr, We are not dead yet!

Jaxtr raised another 10 million dollars in a second round of venture capital led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. It brings the company’s total raised to $20 million. I was little surprised by the funding, but digging more revealed jaxtr new business model. Finally, there is a revenue generating business model. They are venturing into the international voice calling business. With the Voice widgets for social networking proving to be a failing business model , jaxtr is doing the right thing by moving towards supporting international voice calling. Apparently, cheap international calling card company IDT IDT generates around $2 Billion in revenue. This move puts them in direct competition with jajah, mig33, mobivox to name a few.

Some of the folks like Pat, Om and Luca are not really impressed with this whole deal. I partially agree with these folks on what they have to say about the product and funding in general. I have always criticized jaxtr for their lack of solid revenue generating model. So far, they have amassed a huge user based with their free beer model. I’m not sure how much money it’s generating through jaxtr café.

So enough of bitching; For a change I wanted to highlight some of the positive things about jaxtr, and why they will comeout a winner:
• Jaxtr currently has more than 10 million users in 220 countries after about a year in business. Facebook has 70 million user and they are yet to figure out a business model. Same goes with tones of other Web 2.0 startups( twitter,ning,friendfeed etc)
• Cheap International voice Calling is a proven business model. The potential is huge and has enough dough for multiple players
• Ad based voice and SMS will be successful in future
• As the founder of Linked In, Konstantine Guericke, chief executive of Jaxtr, knows and understands the dynamics of social networking.
• The new round of funding is led by Lehman Brothers, one of the top VC, which validates their product and vision
• Jaxtr café has potential to generate revenue through ads

Ok, I’m not gone talk about the downside in this article. Will save that for future. For now, I wish Konstantine and team a big success.

Location,Location,Location,Nokia grabs Plazes

It’s been a while since I talked about location based applications. Well, i'm happy to see LBS based startups gaining momentum and actually being acquired. Today, Nokia grabbed plazes. Plazes is a location based social networking startup that provides a context aware social activity service.

Plazes is a 13 people company located in Berlin. Plazes supports updating your location using FireEagle,Desktop software using WIFI or SMS. For sharing location, plazes support iCal, map widgets and KML. Congratulations to the plazes team for pulling through the rough times. This is a crowded market with no clear winners so far. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Considering there was no revenue so far and the investment not that big, nokia wouldn’t have spent big bucks.

Here is what Nokia has to say about the acquisition:

"This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy," said Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software. "In addition to the key assets, through this acquisition Nokia will bring on a visionary team with an advanced understanding of social-activity services, as well as the technical ability to further develop this area."

By acquiring Plazes, Nokia will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features. Plazes adds the elements of "place" and "time" to social networking through features that allow people to alert friends of their activity and location; review their own and others' past activities; share their experiences and make plans with friends, who are then able to respond with comments and suggestions as well as their own location information.

Some of the other startups that are trying their luck in location based applications are Loopt, Whrrl and BrightKite . Loopt is making great strides in North America. They have partnership with some of the biggest operators in North America. This is definitely a big deal compared to other startups.

Top news for this week

Here is some of the top news for this week:

YouTube going long form of video
Facebook marches ahead of MySpace
Fring release developer API
Skype 4.0 beta coming to life
Google trends launced for website
BTW, it doesn’t show up data for small websites.

Where is the Money? Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0

How do we monetize Web 2.0 startups is a million dollar question that is hounding every entrepreneur and Venture capitalist. Even the mighty facebook and youtubes are struggling to monetize their huge user base. According to forrester, it looks like making money from Web 2.0 startups aimed at consumers is incredibly hard. What is more disappointing is the odds of success are one in thousand startups. Ok, maybe a little exaggerated.

Other than Google we have not seen a startup in recent years that found the gold mine. Facebook hasn’t found the gold mine; most of the other startups are still dependent on the Google Adsense ads (ning etc). We have seen tones of articles written about how to monetize twitter service, which for the most part is hugely popular with bloggers and early adopter. Still they are struggling to find that revenue generating business model. Some folks feel we are in the Web 2.0 bubble world waiting for the bubble to burst. Don’t count me as part of this crowd. I still feel there is plenty of potential in Web 2.0 startups. Google did have the same problem until they figured out the ad model. Same goes with other good startups. Some startups fizzle out in the journey, some stay put till they find the gold mine. So don’t write these startups off.

So where is the money? Enterprise 2.0 startups that are building social apps for corporate are raking in the mullah. These are the startups that are not very popular with the bloggers, but are popular among the corporate.

Here are some of startups that are making revenue (Forrester has categorized them based on the objectives)
• Listening (Communicate, BuzzMetrics,Cymfony, Umbria. MotiveQuest)
• Talking( Brains on Fire, Edelman, Avenue A/Razorfish)
• Energizing(Bazaar voice’s , Power Reviews, ExpoTV)
• Supporting(Mzinga/Prospero, Jive Software, Awareness, Lithium )
• Embracing(Salesforce Ideas, Innocentive )

Off late enterprise 2.0 startups are gaining momentum and there is a huge potential in this arena. I had earlier written about enterprise 2.0 business opportunity . The only caveat in enterprise startups are- it’s hard to get traction for big corporations.

Windows live VoIP service in trouble

Microsoft has decided to terminate its Windows Live VoIP service that was being provided so far with partnership with verizon. Not sure if VoIM is generating enough revenue for some of these IM vendors. Yahoo outsourced their yahoo messenger Voice connectivity to Jajah. Google has no interest in supporting Voice calls to landline or mobile from Gtalk. AOL VoIP is not doing anything good to prove things wrong.

The service shall be terminated on the following dates
• EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) - July 15th 2008,
• USA - August 31st 2008.

Well, it looks Microsoft has not yet decided on a successor to Version Web calling in Windows Live messenger. Iam not sure how much money these IM vendors are generating through VoIM service. We all know skype has been making good revenue from its VoIM feature. In fact this is the biggest revenue generation feature for skype. With their skypeout and skypein, skype has been successful in cashing its huge user base.

So where does this leave Microsoft in this whole voice and messaging game. Well, another interesting product that Microsoft is working currently is called echoes. According to Mary Jo Foley from zdnet , come this summer, Microsoft plans to announce echoes service platform for Telco providers. I would still bet on other platform providers like ribbit, jajah, broadsoft, alcatel/lucent than Microsoft. We love/hate Microsoft has an OS platform and desktop apps provider. Service platform doesn’t glue well here. Om has some insight on this

Here are some highlights of echoes platform:
• Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact.
• Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
• The user will be able to compose an SMS or place a voice call to these contacts
• Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to Windows Live contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back from Messenger as SMS
• Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC
• As the mobile user will appear always “online” to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS

IPhone, iPod Apps worth more then Facebook apps

According to Investment bank Piper Jaffray, Apple’s AppStore could emerge as $1.2 billion. Wow, this sounds like there is a huge potential in this arena. Now that iPhone is going to be launched in more than 70 countries. The number of user owning an iPhone shall be humongous. I always believed in the potential of iPhone apps. Despite the fact that even I don’t believe the billion dollar shit, Nevertheless, there is still a huge revenue generation potential in these iPhone apps. Well, at least its better than building apps for facebook, which has been a big failure so far .

Analyst Gene Munster predicts a billion dollar based on better of the three possible case scenarios he came up with. In total, the three scenarios have the App Store adding 1% to 3% more operating income to Apple by the end of 2009.

Here is how Munster’s arrived at the numbers; His assumption is that 77.7 million active App Store users will download two applications from the service each year at an average app revenue per sue of $10 -- one free and one costing $10 -- generating sales of about $777 million and a profit of $163 million. This is a very conservative numbers. So if you top this with higher adoption rates around 95 percent (or 80.8 million active users) -- which would bump revenues to $1.21B and profits to $254 million.










Apparently, there are conflicting iPhones sales predictions for 2009. Off course piper is way too aggressive with his numbers. Check out the picture below (courtesy techcrunch)









So folks if you are busy building apps for social networking platforms, which has not been a smooth ride; building something for iPhone should be a game changer. (I need to buy a MAC and start playing around with iPhone SDK)

The wait is over! 3G iPhone coming this July

Today was indeed 3G iPhone’s big day. Every technology news sites that I can think off, were busy the whole day covering nitty-gritty details of 3G iPhone. I was excited myself about the 3G iPhone. Apple finally announced that 3G iPhone shall be available in the market by this July.

What's interesting is- In the US the new iPhone 3G shall be priced at a stunning $199 for the 8GB model, and just $299 for the 16GB model. Some of the countries that will see 3G iPhone are —Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US—on July 11

Highlights of the 3G iPhone:
• Thinner edges, full plastic back, flush headphone jack, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware
• Its 3G speeds shall trounce the competition, with pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and Treo 750
• 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio.
• Uses A-GPS, which supplements regular satellite GPS data with info from cellular towers
• Enables PUSH support. This means that a person can receive an email, get an alert, receive an update from eBay without having to be in the application, or without having to run it in the background.
• Will have an App Store from where consumers can download games,video,music and other applications
• Lots of enterprise features, RIM blackberry beware. Is this the new blackberry killer


Lot of folks have written exclusively about 3G iPhone. So Instead of writing the same stuff again, I have collected some good article below. Enjoy!
List of new apps from TechCrunch
Pricing Information from Gizmodo
First Impression From Walt Mossberg
Om Talks about stress testing ATT 3G network with 3G iPhone

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