Google Starts Shopping in Korea; Buys Blog Platform Maker TNC

According to TNC’s founder Chang Kim, Google has acquired the company, described by Kim herself as “a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers.”

Google hasn’t been too keen on acquiring companies in Asia so far, and this is their first acquisition of a Korean company; it is almost certainly a strategic move, because I somehow doubt that Google - who owns Blogger - is in need of a blogging platform from a purely technological point of view. Kim, however, claims that TNC’s platform, called Textcube, is technologically very advanced (thanks to VentureBeat for the quotes, as Kim’s blog is down at the time of this writing):

“While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.”

Or, perhaps it’s TNC’s 400,000 users (and the majority of Korea’s high profile bloggers) that Google is after. We’ll find out soon enough.

Itsmy Mobile Social Network Gets Ambitious With its Media Play

Think mobile video is going to be big stuff? German mobile social networking outfit GoFresh is looking to capitalize on the medium with the rollout of some key features for its own Itsmy.com service.

We first heard from Itsmy last month when it introduced something it called “the first social phone book.” Which of course elicits a been-done response. But really it’s about establishing social profiles within your friendly circle based on your contact list. Now the company is talking making user-generated video into something not only disregards PC use entirely, but that makes good money, too.

A look at Itsmy.com will show a three-part puzzle. Itsmy.com stands as the mobile social networking hub. Itsmy.tv touts itself as “the number one personal TV service - 1000TV shows/day.” And then there is Itsmy.biz, which manages mobile social advertising. Altogether, they make an adventurous lot. As Michael Stroud writes in NewTeeVee, “The company…runs its own moderated broadcasts on the ‘videos of the week,’” plus other items, and in doing so “has attracted some A-list advertisers like Ford, Reebok, Vodafone and Universal, who run several-second spots, banners or branded programs….”

Looking at the Itsmy.biz page, it has grabbed considerable attention among mobile users in the UK and other parts of Europe, including its home state, but also shows names like Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile among carriers each netting six-figure traffic counts. That is also without official backing from those providers, which Itsmy sought for at CTIA in San Francisco last week.

If the numbers put forth by GoFresh are at all accurate, Itsmy is indeed quite valuable. Targeted ad campaigns relative to location are far more effective when matched to mobile telecommunications. Hence the increased attention give on mobile advertising by Google, Microsoft and other Internet companies. Where Itsmy has it good is in its marketing parameters. Even with a claimed user base of 2.5 million, its basic Mobile TV CPM, which interestingly enough presents no targeting and no guaranteed traffic, is listed according: UK inventory, £50; EU inventory, 30€; US inventory, $40; and World inventory, $20.

SGN Acquires Facebook Virtual Pet App (fluff)Friends

Social Gaming Network (SGN), has acquired (fluff)Friends, a Facebook application that lets you adopt a virtual pet, cuddle it, and spend real and virtual money on your little fluffy friend. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

(fluff)Friends’ virtual currency system, which enables users (read: drives addicts) to spend money on food, pimped out dwellings and other tidbits for their pets, seems to be working rather well: since January 2008, there has been a 192% increase in revenue per spender, and a 143% increase in spend per transaction. SGN, on the other hand, has some cash to spend, as it announced $15 million series A round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Founders Fund back in May 2008.

This is another in a long line of SGN’s acquisitions; some of the others were Esgut, Free Gifts, Nicknames, Oregon Trail and Friend Block, and it has now become a formidable force in the world of Facebook apps, both in the number of installs and in the number of talented Facebook application developers on their team.

Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months

The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Some other trends worth noting:

- LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors

- Imeem fell from 3.9 million unique visitors in July to 3.4 million in August. They could be one of the more impacted companies from this month’s expected launch of MySpace Music.

- Buzznet traffic fell 54% year-over-year to 1.8 million unique visitors. The company has recently made a number of acquisitions including Idolator and Qloud to bolster its audience.

The full chart is embedded below:

ม๊อบเทพ สุดตรีน…………………

จัดไปเลย เรื่องจะได้จบ

ไอ้ลิ้ม นั่งนายก
มหา นั่งกลาโหม และ มหาดไทย
ภพ นั่งกระทรวงยุติธรรม
ศักดิ์ นั่ง กระทรวงวัฒนธรรม
ใส ต้องนั่งยาง

ส่วน มาร์ก ก็นั่งที่เดิมต่อไป

Idea First , Management Last. Web 2.0 Idea strategy.

2 days ago I’ve read many success stories from small company but do the big web2.0 business.

“Idea First, Management Last”

It means  how to make the greatest product , successful product , how come?

   They just put the original idea to make product as alpha or beta version.(Techicals ,Performance Issues just leave it behind.)

             No hard calculation , No business rule, No marketing rule

Just the original idea then make it goes live by heart and brain.

These must come first before anything or any constrains.

It sounds like nothing everyone do this way  but in reality the company or web business they will always anaylize huge data , possibilities , feasibility and many more.

so that absolutely cannot make the product original or successful because it will base on the the research and complicated statistical number. That real sucks.  the product will be the combinination of existing, general stuffs on market.  It means the product will never be number 1 .

High risk may be high return or high loosing. (Risk analysis can not be used in this moment web business. )

You will make all possible risks but you may do the outstanding product which all people remember.

   High Risk is nothing…….

then leave it the risk is on your chicken heart.

Steve job never use calulator to invent MAC.

He used crazy brain to invent something different and outstanding.

Unique, Original  the words refer to the thing must come from brain directly with out decoration of management theory.

After  making idea come true and product can stand by itself (I mean your product is successful and ready there ) 

It will need Management Theory to control and sustain your successes.

Here it come management

Marketing, Sales, Operation and so on… blah blah…

The art of success  in Web Business it’s just like that.

Remember

Idea must come first.

ALohA  Art 2008

CERN ประกาศวันเดินเครื่อง LHC แล้ว 10 SEP WORLD CRACKS DOWN

น่ากลัว LHC

Google Chrome : กูเกิ้ลโครม minimalist killer web browser

กูเกิ้ลเปิดตัว Web  Browser
So, I’ve finally completed my search for a new browser to fall in love with. I don’t say this as a Google fanboy, nor do I say this as someone who hates FirefoxFirefox 3 .  Firefox has served its purpose, but Google Chrome (now available for download here) seems to beat it out in every way I’ve tested for so far.

I did a quick screencast earlier so as to record my initial findings and give a quick tour around the functions and features I’d discovered.

In side by side comparisons, I found that Chrome tends to use about 80% less memory than Firefox in loading up the same pages and tabs.  There is also noticeably better long-term memory management as well. Before I recorded the screencast, I left Chrome open for about and hour and a half, and there was only about two extra megabytes of memory usage going on after I came back. After a few minutes of going back to using the the apps I had loaded up, memory usage went back to normal.

Chrome is based off Webkit, the same codebase as Safari.  As I discovered in my usage of the program, though, none of the quirks inherent to Safari were present in Chrome. As I stated yesterday:

My problem with Safari, aside from poor memory management and this inexplicable half second delay that occurs between clicking on a link and the browser going to hit the website, is that it mangles text, particularly in WordPress.

This isn’t something isolated to me, either. It’s a common ailment (but apparently not affecting 100% of the Safari using population) that when you type something into a text box, the last character gets truncated. Whenever I use WordPress to edit a blog post, Safari will do all sorts of weird stuff to re-format what I wrote for me, adding and removing random paragraph tags. 

In several tries, I was unable to duplicate this problem in Chrome, to my delight.

Most of the web apps I use are Google based, but even non-Google AJAX applications loaded quickly.  As a demonstration of the quick responsiveness, I page through a number of Google Reader items, and the display delay I experience in both Internet Explorer and Safari was absent and was in fact even more responsive than I’m used to in Firefox.

Overall, the browser offers a lot more usable space not taken up by toolbars and status bars as in other browsers. The navigation is non-standard, but still simple and intuitive.  It comes packed with Google Gears, the only Firefox add-on I still use (again, due to the insane memory hog tendencies of an enhanced Firefox experience).

I give the whole experience both of my thumbs way up. My default browser is now Google Chrome. Given that I spend 80% of my day on the computer and with the browser loaded, that’s about the best endorsement I can give it.