Posted by Nicholas James on July 8, 2008
When news broke about Twitter were going to buy Summize, you wouldn’t expect it to be from little known blogger Josh Chandler, with Jason Calacanis (Mahalo, CEO) making the story more publicly known (here).
With the rumour breaking through from a little known blogger, people started to investigate. My sources have since told me that a deal is certainly in the works and it is likely to be announced as soon as next week.
The deal seems to make sense. Twitter would be buying itself a business model.
This is because, Summize is seen by the general user as a Twitter search utility. To be honest, with you it is an excellent search service and its that good that, nearly half a dozen other startups using the Summize API and because, of this Twitter could bolt on search on their platform and make it more useful.
Summize, have developed a cleaver system which with the help of Twitter’s vast data stream can find out what’s hot, where and how. The results are essentially keywords (topic, person or location-based) and therefore can be used to show contextual advertising alongside the results which, is a clever way to monetize conversations without being intrusive.
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Posted by Nicholas James on
I’m not the only one to notice that Twitter is having problems and I won’t be the last. However, the problem with Twitter is that they built their service with Ruby on Rails, which initially gave Twitter the advantage of being able to roll out a prototype quickly, launch quickly and easily iterate with new features but the disadvantage is coming to haunt them as it is unscalable due to the fact unlike Java or C, Rails can’t really handle intensive tasks.
This isn’t the only problem. Whilst their architecture is an important aspect of Twitter, the problem is that their main rival - FriendFeed is having no issues. I’m not just talking about the fact that, they hardly suffer any downtime because, FriendFeed gives the ability for users to easily to read replies, have unlimited length replies, search and have the ability to post media (images/videos) to the feed.
Twitter need to fix these issues, which may have to include a site redesign of the user area so they can incorporate new features and introduce advertisements onto their service. The reason why they should consider introducing advertisements is to generate revenue from the service they are providing because, although they’ve raised $20million or so to do, that money isn’t going to last forever especially having to pay a team to rebuild their architecture.
I think that Twitter need to go more FriendFeed-like and to retain users, who are jumping ship over to FriendFeed because, they don’t want to deal with Twitters problems anymore. This will include introducing the ability to post media to the service (which could be possible by incorporating the ability to link other accounts i.e. flickr) and the ability to search (which could be resolved by purchasing Summize).
I’m not saying Twitter need to have a complete overhaul of their system but they need to fix certain areas and incorporate new features what users want i.e. media to not only retain their market share but increase it too.
I don’t think it would be hard for Twitter to implement media onto their system and introduce search into their system (purchasing Summize would make it even easier) and if they think its hard, I’ll even do it for them myself.
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Posted by Nicholas James on
Online search company, WebMynd is nearing a close on its first round of venture capital funding.
Sources tell us that the round is worth $250,000 and that the funding is commited but not yet closed. Investors are currently undisclosed however, we expect to hear more as the round closes.
We previously covered WebMynd here.
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Posted by Nicholas James on July 7, 2008
Berlin-based GameDuell which develops and operates skill-games including Solitaire, Mahjong, Sudoku, Pool and Darts has raised over $17 million in Series B funding from Wellington Partners. They are one of the fastest-growing skill game sites and the number one games community in Germany.
The company will use the funding to accelerate the company’s international expansion into other European countries and the United States, and build on the current 10 million members.
The company’s management team is headed up by experienced Internet entrepreneurs Kai Bolik, Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth and currently employs 80 people with plans to double the workforce in the coming months.
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Posted by Nicholas James on July 5, 2008
UpTake (Formerly Kango), the travel information search engine raised $3.95 million in Series A funding.
The service allows you to decide where to go, where to stay or what to do and aids users to help them make informed decisions about what best fits their travel preferences.
The company claims to have 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions on its database, which have been analyzed and organized millions of travelers’ opinions to enable the user to conduct a search and find the best place based on your exact travel requirements and preferences.
The round was led by Shasta Ventures and Tod Francis will now take a seat on the board.
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