Netvibes Blog

Howard Rheingold on building Information Dashboards

2010-02-08T20:57:31Z

Howard Rheingold, teacher at Stanford and Berkeley, and writer of many books including the famous “SmartMobs“, also runs an excellent video blog. In his latest episodes, he explains how he uses Netvibes as an intelligent dashboard to handle information overload.

Watch the videos after the jump.

Sage ERP X3 and Netvibes unveil plans for Sage Enterprise Webtop ™: a new, unique way to create user centric Enterprise Dashboards
New Netvibes Premium Dashboards Help Global Agencies Monitor Real-Time Brand Conversations and Share Industry Expertise

Sage ERP X3 and Netvibes unveil plans for Sage Enterprise Webtop ™: a new, unique way to create user centric Enterprise Dashboards

2010-01-20T15:10:27Z

Today, we are happy to announce that we’ve been working with Sage, one of the leading suppliers of business management software and services. We’ve been working closely with them to build Sage Enterprise Webtop, an extension for their latest software, Sage ERP X3.

We have a video demo and the full press release for you after the break.

Video demo

Sage Enterprise Webtop demo

Press release

Sage ERP X3 and Netvibes deliver major usability innovation for ERP, enabling enterprises to easily develop powerful widget dashboard applications to automate communications and collaboration, build stronger customer relationships and create personalized workforce tools

Paris, France, January 20, 2010. Sage, one of the world’s leading suppliers of business management software and services, today unveiled its new global mid-market ERP solution, Sage ERP X3 v6, developed for growing companies with sophisticated, international requirements. Sage Enterprise Webtop TM, an upcoming extension to Sage ERP X3, which can operate on the cloud or on premise, was also exclusively previewed.

Sage Enterprise Webtop TM has been developed through collaboration with Netvibes, a pioneer of personal dashboard publishing platforms for the web. It enables any user to instantly create their own personalized widget dashboard applications to manage everything from sales and HR to customer relationships. With an innovative and intuitive drag-and-drop interface the partnership demonstrates Sage ERP X3’s commitment to accessibility, ease of use and simplicity.

“Sage ERP X3 v6 has been built around the user and we have placed great emphasis on ensuring it can adapt to the way each user works. Too often ERP users have had to adapt to the way their applications work but our vision is for customers to have a completely personalized experience, where they can tailor Sage ERP X3 to their exact needs. Through innovations such as Sage Enterprise Webtop TM we are delivering on this vision,” said Emmanuel Obadia, Senior Vice President, Sage ERP X3. “Sage Enterprise Webtop TM will enable any employee, team and permitted external stakeholder to create their own personal dashboards, ensuring they always have the perfect tools for their job or relationship.”

Scheduled with the next point release of Sage ERP X3, due later this year, Sage Enterprise Webtop TM is powered by Wasabi, Netvibes’ highly acclaimed fifth generation dashboard and widget publishing engine. Combining the latest personalization and real-time technologies with the powerful new Sage ERP X3 platform it creates a new solution that bridges the gap between personal Web 2.0 applications and enterprise systems. In just minutes any individual or team in the extended enterprise can build their own personalized workplace dashboard where they can manage all of their real-time feeds, ERP tools and status reports, activity feeds, social networks, email, documents and much more – all in one place.

“As we enter the real-time era, modern information workers are struggling to manage an ever growing myriad of feeds, updates, news searches and new enterprise tools. It’s an endless and fatiguing cycle of checking email, searching for files, switching between applications and catching up with the latest news,” said Freddy Mini, CEO, Netvibes. “Sage Enterprise Webtop TM is the first user personalized enterprise dashboard solution that promises to deliver the right tools and the right information to the right people at exactly the right time, to break this fatigue cycle and boost productivity, by combining Netvibes personalization technology with the power of Sage ERP X3.”

Sage Enterprise Webtop TM helps reduce complexity, increase productivity and make everyday tasks easier. For example dashboards can be used to help:

Enterprise Customers: View and share customer information, requests and updates in real-time to create improved customer experiences through customer self-service dashboards.
Enterprise responsiveness: Monitor hundreds of client and competitor news and Twitter feeds easily, all at a glance, all in one place.
Extended Enterprise: Share processes and custom access to invoices, payments and reports with suppliers and partners. Create self-serve dashboards that enable extended enterprise partners to self manage their most common requests in real-time.
Internal Teams: Offer personalized HR dashboards, where employees can access and manage benefits, view company news and much more. Create team dashboards for sales teams where each user can manage customers and prospects, track sales targets and manage everyday team communications and status updates.

Sage Enterprise Webtop TM will be offered as a SaaS or on premise extension to Sage ERP X3 and will feature:

Drag-and-Drop Publishing: Netvibes’ award-winning design and publishing tools make it easy and intuitive for any user to build powerful real-time dashboards in just minutes, with zero programming required
Sage Enterprise Widget Pack: Professional workplace widgets that let users rapidly and securely access Sage ERP X3 critical business information, perform database queries, view customer information, manage extended enterprise relationships and more
Self-Service Licenses: Publish self-serve dashboards for the extended enterprise that enable partners to access invoices, payments, reports and more
Strategic Support: As an extension of Sage ERP X3, Sage will provide the same world-class training and strategic design to ensure the ease and success of every implementation
Developer’s Network: Sage partners will soon be able to create and offer new workplace tools on Sage Enterprise Webtop TM. They will leverage the generic Sage ERP X3 widgets to create thousands of industry, role and customer specific widgets, tapping into a new revenue opportunity.
Massive Built-in Widget Library: Enterprises can draw from more than 185,000 official widgets and feeds

Netvibes wishes you happy holidays

2009-12-22T13:14:27Z

Dear Netvibes Users,

For Christmas, we have a gift for you: a nice theme that changes every hour. You can see a preview of the theme on its page or get it immediatly:

Get the “Merry Christmas” theme

The whole Netvibes team wishes you happy holidays!

Scheduled maintenance: Monday, December 28th at 5:00 AM UTC/GMT

2009-12-22T10:30:36Z

The service will be inaccessible on Monday, December 28th 2009 at 5:00 AM UTC. We plan to shutdown the service for approximately 2 hours. It will allow us to perform database operations in order to improve the service performance. Thanks for your understanding.

Netvibes Wasabi Introduces a Whole New Way to Manage the Real-Time Web

2009-12-14T10:27:45Z

Highly anticipated Netvibes Wasabi exits private beta and introduces the Web’s first and fastest 2-in-1 Smart Reader, Push Notifications, and near real-time RSS technologies

Paris, France—December 9, 2009—Today at Le Web ‘09, Europe’s premier Internet conference, Netvibes (business.netvibes.com) announced the public release of Wasabi, Netvibes’ fifth generation personal dashboard publishing engine designed specifically to help people better manage all aspects of the real-time Web. Wasabi introduces a completely new way to manage the real-time Web, with an all-new Smart Reader that accelerates and delivers everything users enjoy on the Web—from widgets to Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds—as a continually flowing, constantly updated, cascading stream of personalized information. Moreover, Netvibes Wasabi also gives people an easier and faster way to publish personalized dashboards and interactive websites for free, with new visual design tools and multiple page publishing features. Netvibes Wasabi is now available at: http://www.netvibes.com

“We’ve entered the real-time Web without the right tools to manage it all in one place. So we jump endlessly between our RSS reader, startpage widgets, Twitter dashboard, Facebook page, chat applications, desktop, phone and Web browser,” said Freddy Mini, CEO Netvibes. “Wasabi is the first to offer an easier and better way to view and manage the real-time Web. No clicking from link to link, no refreshing, no application switching. Just a free-flowing stream of everything that matters to you on the real-time Web.”

Ever since Netvibes Wasabi entered private beta testing last month, tens of thousands of requests by users, companies and publishers have been made in hope of getting early access. Starting today, Wasabi is now publicly available to everyone for free at: http://www.netvibes.com.

We are currently upgrading all users to the new version. The process will take a few days. If you can’t wait to get upgraded, you can get an instant upgrade by visiting http://wasabi.netvibes.com/:

New Features Designed For the Real-Time Web:

Dual-Purpose Navigator: Netvibes Wasabi is the world’s first 2-in-1 widget startpage and feed reader, which offers multiple ways of viewing, organizing and personalizing the real-time Web.

Netvibes Smart Reader: Netvibes Wasabi offers the fastest reader on the planet. Unlike other readers that just do RSS, Netvibes Smart Reader delivers everything—RSS, Twitter and Facebook updates (coming soon), widget apps, notifications, photos, podcasts, videos and more—into a virtually endless, universal stream of personalized media. New mosaic views also give people a new way to view the real-time Web, like a beautifully designed, personalized magazine.

Near Real Time RSS: Netvibes Wasabi comes with a brand new feed delivery engine. Netvibes new instant update engine and full support for Pubsubhubbub and RSSCloud technologies accelerates and brings RSS into the era of the real-time Web. No more waiting or refreshing; the latest feeds are delivered to Netvibes users in near real-time.

Multiple Page Publishing: Netvibes also becomes a rapid Web publishing tool. Users can choose from more than 185,000+ widgets and feeds and 1000+ themes from the Netvibes Ecosystem, and quickly build interactive, personalized websites in just minutes using Wasabi’s new visual design tools that give users complete control—without the hassle of coding. Wasabi also offers unlimited page creation, free hosting, flexible layout, multi-view widgets and HTML support.

Push Publishing & Notifications: Netvibes makes it easy for publishers to send live notifications, widget and content updates, and design changes to users with Netvibes Premium Dashboards, while giving users the power to choose which updates they like most.

Drag-and-Follow Widgets: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace widgets make it easy for users to follow new topics as they appear by simply dragging any hashtag or username out to automatically create a new widget to track that topic or conversation.

New Netvibes Premium Dashboards Help Global Agencies Monitor Real-Time Brand Conversations and Share Industry Expertise

2009-12-03T23:13:26Z

Ogilvy PR, Tribal DDB, WeissComm Group, Rumeur Publique, CRM Company Group and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Use Netvibes Premium Dashboards to Rapidly Publish Live Brand Rooms and Expert Knowledge Portals.

San Francisco, California—December 3, 2009—Modern brand marketers are struggling to manage and keep track of the myriad of sources of real-time media, live news feeds, user generated content and comments on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more that comprise the voice of their brand. Today, Netvibes (business.netvibes.com), the personal dashboard publishing platform for the Web, announced that it has partnered with top global marketing and pr agencies and industry associations to deploy real-time brand monitoring dashboards and expert industry knowledge portals using the latest version of Netvibes Premium Dashboards–which features Wasabi, Netvibes’ 5th generation personalization publishing engine. Now marketers have a way to quickly build personalized brand dashboards to readily manage large, real-time media ecosystems around brands, clients and industries.

Already more than 1,500 brands, enterprises and media publishers rely on Netvibes’ widget and dashboard publishing technologies, including AT&T, Nestle, BMW, Nissan, Samsung, T-Online, Fast Company, The Financial Times and Pages Jaunes—with more than half a billion widgets served to millions of consumers around the globe every month.

Now top interactive agencies and industry associations–including Ogilvy PR, Tribal DDB, WeissComm Group, Rumeur Publique, CRM Company Group and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)—are publishing their own personalized brand monitoring dashboards and expert knowledge portals using the latest edition of Netvibes Premium Dashboards to help clients and brand marketers better manage the real-time Web.

After the successful launch of numerous high-profile projects in 2009–including brand dashboards for Fortune 500 and major pharmaceutical clients—these top agencies and associations are unanimously speaking out about the benefits of dashboard publishing for brand marketers in the era of the real-time Web:

“We used Netvibes Premium Dashboards to create The Daily Influence, a personalized industry knowledge portal that’s full of feeds from media, social media and trending services. We did this for our own staff and it quickly caught on with clients and other marketing and communications professionals,” said John Bell, Managing Director, 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy. “Building a large-scale media portal with this level of interactivity and content is usually a big deal. The whole widgetized approach to Netvibes, made it super-simple. It’s really versatile too. We also just added a ‘Listening Post – lite’ feature making it easy for brand marketers to monitor for their brand in CGM.”

“Netvibes Premium Dashboards are the perfect solution for any reputation manager who wants to keep a live snapshot of the entire online voice of a brand–from literally hundreds of different places at once. With Netvibes, we can share our expertise with clients by publishing and curating our own brand monitoring dashboards, ensuring they are always close to the heart of modern consumers,” said Christophe Ginisty, CEO and founder, Rumeur Publique, one of the top communications agencies in France.

“We’ve been working with the University of British Columbia International Student Recruitment to innovate ways to attract students to the university from around the globe. ConnectionsForLife is an online experience that links prospective students to current students, faculty, alumni and ground-breaking ideas,” said Amber Bezahler, Managing Director, Tribal DDB, a top ten global interactive agency. “This is seamlessly facilitated by Netvibes Premium Dashboards which made it a snap for us to surface everything UBC online (news feeds to Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and more) within a social media dashboard. Best yet, the personalization features invite students and alumni to make the page their own, helping us achieve our goal of building an engaged community.”

“Our mission is to help spread and share knowledge across the advertising industry. The problem isn’t the lack of information, but rather the opposite–there are too many news sites and feeds for advertising professionals to absorb everyday. Our members and industry need relevancy,” said Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director, The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). “With Netvibes Premium Dashboards, we created Morning Coffee as the go-to knowledge portal for the advertising industry, filled with all the best feeds hand picked by experts at The ARF. But the best part is knowing that our audience can go further when they wish, using Netvibes powerful user personalization features.”

“We believe that customers should invest in actionable insights that build brand value, which is why it is key to provide news direct to one’s desktop with minimal time or financial investment to free up these valuable resources,” said Bob Pearson, Chief Technology & Media Officer, WeissComm Group. “Netvibes Premium Dashboards enable our clients to review the latest news about their brand in real-time. Efficiency and speed matter and Netvibes delivers.”

“We advise Netvibes Premium Dashboards for monitoring what is going on the Web for our clients. Not only a brand manages in real time its e-reputation but it keeps up with its customers, listening to conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Netvibes is secure and customizable at will, and Dashboards are easy to share with coworkers. In our view, Netvibes Premium Dashboards is the first step for implementing a real social marketing strategy,” Pascal Josselin CEO and Founder, CRM Company Group, a leading French communications strategy firm.

The Dashboard Publishing Solution Designed for Brand Marketers

Netvibes Premium Dashboards feature a built-in content library of more than 185,000 widgets and fully licensed content feeds, real-time push notification, powerful visual layout tools and an award-winning drag-and-drop interface that make it easy to build fully branded real-time media dashboards without the time or cost of traditional development. Premium Dashboards are fully hosted, proven to scale to millions of users and easy to embed seamlessly within any domain. Premium Dashboards can be used to create interactive brand rooms, real-time brand conversation aggregators, industry knowledge portals and live media monitoring dashboards for clients, marketing teams or public audiences.

Last week, Netvibes’ highly anticipated 5th generation personalization publishing engine, codenamed “Wasabi”, entered private beta testing. Already earning early media acclaim, Wasabi offers the industry’s fastest smart feed reader and first 2-in-1 widget startpage/reader dashboard, integrated push publishing tools and the next-generation real-time technologies that accelerate RSS content delivery and commenting. Wasabi technology gives Netvibes Premium Dashboards an unprecedented level of live monitoring capabilities spanning the entire Internet by offering both widget and stream views for all content. To learn more about Netvibes Wasabi, visit: http://wasabi.netvibes.com.

Partnership with Sage brings Netvibes to even more Enterprises

2009-11-04T14:30:15Z

We just announced a milestone partnership with Sage to quickly integrate Netvibes personal dashboard technology into their next ERP X3 release by Q1 2010. Sage is one of the world’s largest business software providers for small and mid-sized businesses, so we’re very excited to be able to work together to bring Netvibes to so many, so soon.

As many of you are well aware, the modern workday is getting faster and more complex. People working at companies of all sizes need to juggle a variety of business apps, industry feeds, real-time client and competitor news–as well as their favorite personal media, social networks, widget and web apps. With our latest Netvibes Wasabi release (you can sign up for our private beta here) we eliminated the back and forth window switching and refreshing many people do between their widget startpages, feed readers and real-time web apps. Now with Sage, we hope to help make the workday easier by bringing enterprise tools and your personal interests together on a single, personalized workplace dashboard.

In short, we want to make your workday a little bit more like Netvibes—quick, easy to manage, and 100% personalized by you. This vision is becoming a reality as we speak: We’ve already engaged in the process of joint development to build these new applications together and starting today, Sage will begin offering Netvibes Premium Dashboards and Netvibes for Enterprise to their customers worldwide.

Furthermore, we believe this partnership will greatly advance the Enterprise 2.0 movement by combining the best business software (Sage ERP X3) with the best Web 2.0 technologies and personal environment (Netvibes) and by bringing the best of these two worlds together as one.

Freddy Mini, CEO

Twitter widget with conversations

2009-11-04T14:30:31Z

As you may have noticed, we just updated the Twitter widget. This time, we went for incremental improvements to make your daily use of twitter more enjoyable.

Here’s a short list of what’s new:

Global redesign
- the header now matches the facebook widget
- tweets are displayed as bubbles
- your tweets are emphasized with by putting your avatar on the opposite side
- the widget is globally more compact
Conversations: you can now see which tweets a reply is referring to. Simply click on “in reply to username” to expand the conversation.
Real names: usernames can now be replaced by the real names of your contacts
Message soft limit: messages are no longer truncated when reaching the 140 characters limit. The counter will just show that your message is too long so you can shorten it by yourself

We also fixed some of the bugs you reported to us and made the widget refresh more often, among other things. Let us know what you think by sending us an e-mail or by sending a message to @netvibes!

The next Netvibes: Wasabi Edition

2009-11-02T15:23:27Z

Back in July, we revealed a few details about our work in progress on a new product and a breakthrough backend for the next Netvibes generation. Our goal was to make feed reading faster and easier.

Since then, not only we’ve been giving final touches to the architecture, but we have also designed a full-fledged feed reader. And today, we are happy to introduce you to our next version: Netvibes Wasabi Edition.

This edition makes Netvibes a truly unique and innovative 2-in-1 product offering both the widget view Netvibes pioneered and a brand new Smart Reader to improve the way your read feeds:

by streamlining feeds while keeping widgets only one click away
by offering faster updates
by showing articles as pictures in a beautiful mosaic view

As mentionned above, this new Netvibes will be powered by new technologies. After comprehensive benchmarks, our technical team decided to step away from RDMS (Relational Database Management Systems) and picked Tokyo Tyrant (along with Tokyo Cabinet) as the main database for the feeds.

We might dive into the details later, but in a nutshell, it allows us to go much faster than traditional databases while using only a fraction of the disk space.

Like with any major release, we’re taking extra caution, hence this βeta period where users will upgrade progressively to Netvibes Wasabi Edition.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

Sign up now to get your own βeta invitation
Soon after, we will send out invite codes so you can have access to the new Smart Reader. We will send the codes progressively as we monitor the behavior of the new architecture.
During the βeta period, we will collect feedbacks and regularly update Netvibes Wasabi Edition.
When we’ll be satisfied with the new architecture and the Smart Reader, all Netvibes users will automatically be upgraded to Wasabi.

Before you apply for an invitation code, you need to know that once you’re upgraded to Netvibes Wasabi Edition, there’s no way back. Obviously, we are taking extra care of your data, but consider yourself warned.

Ready? Simply head toward http://wasabi.netvibes.com/ and follow the instructions.

Netvibes Push Publishing and the Future of Web Personalization

2009-10-14T16:15:03Z

Two years ago, we introduced the first generation of our Publishing Platform with our Premium Universes, allowing our partners to publish a fully personalized page, built on Netvibes technology, integrated within their web site and accessible on their domain.

Today, with the release of the Push Publishing, I’m pleased to announce our second generation, named Premium Dashboard, uniquely orchestrating live publisher updates and complete user freedom.

As many of you know, our original vision of Netvibes has and always will be about advancing the movement to personalize the entire Web.

There are two ways of doing this: The first has been with Netvibes.com, which represents a bottom up, grassroots approach, giving everyone the opportunity to create, personalize and publish their own daily digital lives. The second way is with Netvibes Premium Dashboards, which represents a top down approach to personalize the Web, by giving publishers the tools to build user personalizable sites.

Just imagine if every website, every media portal, every brand or product page on the Web was 100% user personalizable. If we are truly committed to personalizing the Web, we feel we have to help both consumers and publishers with the right tools to make this possible.

But as we rapidly move towards the real-time Web, one question many people have had is can push publishing coexist with user personalization? Although publishers want to give and users want to receive live updates, at the same time, users don’t want publishers to alter their personal environment without permission. Look no further than the recent controversy over major UI changes with some of the web’s most popular sites. We believe websites and webapps should function more like real desktop apps, like in Windows, Mac OS X or Firefox where users get to decide which updates to accept.

That’s why for Premium Dashboards we developed Push Publishing Tools that make it easy for any publisher to deliver new updates, themes, widgets and content directly to users–while giving users the power to pick and choose which updates they want to accept. By doing so, we hope to empower both users and publishers alike to work together in harmony as we enter the real-time AND personalized Web.

As always, we could never have accomplished this without the feedback and support of our users and the many agencies and publishers we work with. Thank you and we look forward to hearing what you think about the new Netvibes Premium Dashboards.

Freddy Mini, CEO