Companies that have already raised money need to monitor every penny spent from now on.  Those trying to raise money will have a hard time finding investors if they don’t have a real business plan.  It seems that the idea of “we’ll figure out later how to make money, first let’s concentrate on acquiring users” is dying.

One company which is trying to navigate in today’s troublesome waters is Seesmic.

Loic Le Meur, the founder and CEO of the company, just announced on his blog that it will let go seven employees (about one third of Seesmic workforce). That’s on top of another three employees who were let go already a few weeks ago.  Not good news, but at least he was open and said it straight… It is very open with the press too - he was very fast in responding to some of my questions as well.

Seesmic raised about $12 million dollars so far.  The last $6 million round raised a few months ago came from Wellington Partners and Omidyar Network.  Seesmic acquired the Adobe AIR desktop client Twhirl which allows users to access the Twitter service directly from their desktop, and also cross post to other services (Pownce, Jaiku being one of them).

Hopefully, they will have enough money to get out on the other side of the tunnel.
Good luck, Seesmic!

Now, I suppose we will hear more news about these kind of lay-off’s from other startups.

Jason Calacanis warn us that 50%-80% of the venture-backed companies will not make it or be on life support in the next 18 months.

But venture capitalist William Quigley (Clearstone Venture Partners) has a more cold-blooded assesment of the situation (via Venturebeat).

Five years after the dot com crash, investors came to realize that in fact Internet and telco centric business models (think Google, RIMM) were among the most profitable businesses of our era. This lesson is now well known. What does that mean? I believe this time around the entire tech sector will not be abandoned. If anything, there will be more conviction around the best businesses and business ideas.

This very same phenomenon is happening now in the banking sector. In the middle of the panic phase of the financial crisis, investors speak highly of BofA, JP Morgan, and US Bankcorp.

Amen to that!

Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html

No, please don’t panic. It’s not “that” kind of revolution which is taking place there now.
It’s another kind, a revolution which took the world by storm in the last decade and still continues today. Some countries entered in this revolution earlier, some later.

But the later ones sometimes are leading the pack and one of them is…yes, Russia!

Comscore released a study at in which states that Russia has the fastest growing Internet population from Europe. It grew by 27% in June, 2008 comparing with June, 2007 (over 17 million). The second place is taken by France (21%) and Spain (15%).

However, a local research foundation called Public Opinion Foundation shows that the total Internet users are around 32 million (spring 2008). An English version of that page is here: http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/projects/ocherk/eint0702 (although it’s not updated with 2008 data yet).

At a population of over 141 million people that means that about 12% of that population goes online (about 22% according to Public Opinion Foundation). That’s the entire Romanian population and then some (for POF numbers).

Everything has to be scalable

Now, you know Russia is the largest country in the world when it comes to its territory. That puts pressure on its infrastructure, including IT infrastructure. Everything has to be big and more scalable.

NGENIX (use Google Translate for the English version) is the first Russian Content Delivery Network (CDN) to address the huge local market, according to Quintura blog.

NGENIX potential customers include media publishers, multimedia content providers and software distributors. So far, it opened points of presence in Moscow (their headquarters), Saint-Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok (see map).

They use UNIX-based solutions, Juniper M series routers and Gigabit switches Cisco Catalyst switches hardware. There’s no list of customers but since it just launched that’s understandable. Having a large territory and good Internet growth rate I’m assuming that more regional content delivery networks will enter the Russian market pretty soon.

SHiFT - Lisbon - October 15 to 17

From organizer Bruno Pedro:

SHiFT is an International Tech Conference happening in sunny Lisbon, Portugal this October 15 to 17. This year’s edition is devoted to “Transient Technologies”, in the sense that technology is breaking up with its digital boundaries and it’s becoming a vital part of a lot of the things we do and interact with in our daily lives.

The conference itself is two days long but there will be an entire day devoted to free workshops on the day before.

As always, there’s an exciting speaker lineup but this year the conference is also open for session proposals.”

Discount code: There’s a 20 percent discount for Next Web readers like you. Register here and use promocode nextweb-b04e9349.

SOMESSO - Zurich - October 31

From organizer Arjen Strijker:

SOMESSO, the Corporate Social Media Conference is a series of recurring events organized throughout large cities in Europe where industry leaders, sales and marketing experts, agency new media specialists, Internet marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other financiers share their ideas about corporate social media and present their latest projects and discoveries.

This year, SOMESSO will be held October 31 at Papiersaal - Sihlcity in Zurich, Switzerland. Among the questions discussed at SOMESSO, participants will explore:

• How is Social Media changing the way we do business?
• What Social Media tools should be used and which ones are a waste of time?
• How to start building short-term Corporate Social Media Strategy?
• The return of niche networks - what’s next? (Individualization, community forming)
• It’s a new ballgame - what Code of Conduct to apply when interacting with customers?

Discount code: There’s a 25 percent discount for Next Web readers like you. Register here and use promocode XYSO08CEJNEXTW.

In recognition of these bearish times, the Blog08 conference, organized by Ernst-Jan and Edial and cooperation with The Next Web, came up with a special financial crisis offer. Only today people who know people that have been hit by the crisis can buy one ticket and get their friend a free entrance pass. Help a friend!

Read on blog08 how to get it

(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)

So where does last year’s buzz stand now?

October 8, 2007 - Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.

October 9, 2007 - Google acquired Jaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it.  As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.

October 10, 2007 - Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.

Many people, especially from US, Canada and UK, but also Estonia, Lithuania and Iceland are familiar with the site Fotki.com. The founder Dmitri Don calls it photo-sharing, photo-printing, photo-selling and blogging website. I’d call it image-oriented social network. One that’s pretty good-looking.

Last year the site was recognized by CNET as one of the best Web 2.0 applications in the world, side by side with success stories like YouTube and MySpace. 

Dmitri Don, who claims he never had to go to school to learn programming, says Fotki.com has more than half a million unique visitors and about 25+ million unique people who they serve images from their cluster. These are daily figures.

“We power the world”

But Fotki, as Don point out, is not just a website, but also web service. “We power the world, but nobody knows much about this!” Don says. The Estonian company is licensing photo-sharing software and providing hosting and storage services for digital content for huge global companies, with annual turnover over $50 billion.

One of them is Telecom Italia, the giant operator that’s active in seven European and Latin-American markets. Alice.it, its multifunctional web portal is powered by Fotki photo engine.

US clients

Another big guy Fotki serves is US retailer Sears, that operates more than 3800 shops. Sears’s home management and services portal ManageMyHome.com is run by Fotki’s photo engine. Don hurls names of US clients, one after the other - vacation organizer Mark Travel, media group Vegas.com, turism company Funjet.com etc.

Exceptional team in Estonia

Fotki was founded ten years ago in New York by Don and his wife Katrin Lilleoks (both pictured). By accident that was the exact same day some other guys founded Google! Fotki’s back-office and development team is in Estonia, Tallinn. This team is kind of exceptional, because it consists of 25 Russian-speaking Estonians, lead by Russian citizen Pavel Merdin.

“East Coast not a good place for Internet business”

This year Fotki moved its US office from New York to Silicon Valley. “The East Coast is not a good place for Internet business. People there don’t know much about the Internet. They ask stupid questions, like why do people want to upload their photos online?” Don claims.

An East Coast bank refused to open an account for Fotki in 2001. That’s because Don had said to the banker that he is running an Internet business. Don: “People from East Coast think that Internet business is porn, gambling, stealing and dirty money!”.

Fotki will raise some venture capital from Europe very soon. “Stay tuned!” says Don.

Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

Should you buy that pro account or not?

The trend of desktop software finding web equivalents has started some years ago, and really catched on the last couple of months. The “Cloud” has become Buzzword no.1. Therefore it’s the obvious move for Wakoopa.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means. First of all, you’ll get insight in your own usage of several services. Are you as much on Twitter as you say you are? Should you buy a Flickr pro account? What is the social network you use the most? Wakoopa knows.

Transparency in the web app market

But wait, there’s more! If Wakoopa is able to get a critical mass, it will reflect the pulse of all popular and unpopular web apps. Nowadays, VC’s, journalists, and bloggers depend on the press releases of startups and crappy Alexa ratings to get an idea of how popular a service is. Wakoopa could be the ultimate resource to discover new hot web apps (and the ones that are heading straight for the deadpool).

Recommendation Engine

Furthermore, Wakoopa is working on an improved version of their recommendation engine. They’ve hired two recommendation experts to get this done. According to founder Wouter Broekhof the engine is already in the testing phase. With the new data flowing in from web apps they will be able to give personalized recommendation on the use of your software, for desktop as well as web applications.

Are they tracking porn sites as well?

A friend of mine recently admitted to only use Safari to fulfill his online adult needs. He also uses Wakoopa…, you do the math. When I heard Wakoopa started tracking web apps, I realized privacy-related issues would become even more relevant. Especially since your Wakoopa profile page shows up high in the search results. How do we know Wakoopa doesn’t track sites or web apps we rather keep private?

Well, to ease your mind: Wakoopa Lead Developer Menno van der Sman told me Wakoopa only tracks tools that are mentioned in Crunchbase, and they filtered out sites like YouPorn.

Disclosure: Wakoopa is our sponsor

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Article marketing has recession-proofed my online businesses. Now I know that is a big claim, and lots of people are talking about how to recession-proof your business right now.

Read on to discover how to really do it with Article Marketing and the article-a-day strategy.

Here are 7 ways an article-a-day can recession-proof your business:

1. Extend your reach

I like to call my articles my “international evergreen article agents.” My articles allow me to reach all over the world into many markets that I could not have reached in any other way. And they are evergreen, which means they are out there forever, delivering good information with links back to my websites and blogs. For example, just one article I has published online in August of 2005 still receives an average of 1500 unique views each month. And once you learn how to do it the right way, is is free.

2. Unlimited content

One of the things you must have on the internet is content, and lots of it. When you write an article a day, you create an unlimited stream of regular content. While most online entrepreneurs are worried about where their next content is coming from, you are creating
content everyday.

3. Repurposing

When you create an article a day, you have arrived in repurposing heaven. You can take just one article and turn it into multiple marketing messages such as a blog post, a teleseminar, ebooks, ecourses, and so much more. Repurposing leads to…

4. Even more content

Your content creation does not stop with your article creation. When you repurpose your articles into multiple marketing messages, you are creating even more content. The more content you have, the greater web presence you can create. I’m getting ahead of myself though, because that is number five.

5. Create a massive web presence

When you have a storehouse of content and turn it into multiple marketing messages, you are then able to create a massive web presence. What is the advantage of a massive web presence? Prospects find you everywhere, and you begin to be seen as the go-to-person in your niche. And remember this:

A massive web presence is not created in a day, A massive web presence is created a little bit everyday.

6. Ups your expert-ability

I define your “expert-ability” as your perceived expert status in the mind of your prospect. When you are creating article content just about everyday you will quickly be seen as an expert in your field. Even better, you come to be seen as THE go-to-expert in your
niche.

7. Rapid product creation

Another thing you need to be successful on the Internet in any economy is many products, or what can be called an information empire. As an article writer and article marketer, you have the keys to your own information empire kingdom. You can quickly repurpose your articles into teleseminars, ebooks, ecourse, DVDs, and many other information products.

And to get started with your article-a-day campaign, you can claim your free instant access to my 7 Tips Article Writing Template when you go to 7TipsArticleTemplate.com.

It looks more like a direct reply actually. A reply that quotes most of the original message too and doesn’t add much. Do you know those replies? You write a long, funny and intelligent story and anxiously await a reply only to get your whole message back with one sentence at the top?
That is what the Blackberry Storm is like.

Even worse: the online demo looks and feels terribly low tech. The “Typing and Email” demo is supposed to show me how cool and fast text entry is on the Blackberry Storm. We recorded what it looks like here so you can get look too:

Blackberry Storm vs iPhone from Patrick de Laive on Vimeo.

32.4 for the Blackberry Storm VS 22.3 on the iPhone! Ugh!

You could argue that this is ‘just’ a demo and the real product will be much cooler, but isn’t that a bit weird? Take a look at the movies for the iPhone. Like this one. High production values, terrible slick and amazingly cool. If you manage to ignore the slick sales guy.

Maybe the demo just sucks on a Mac and works a lot better on a PC but how much sense would that make? If you are going to compete with the iPhone you better make sure your demos work well on the Mac as I’m sure a very large part of iPhone users also own Macs.

Well no, RIM is not interested in any Mac users, at all. You can Sync your desktop iTunes® music files using BlackBerry® Media Sync, unless you have a Mac. It only works with Windows, as explained in Fine Print bullet number 9.

I have been a loyal Crackberry user for years. I used, abused, trashed and lost more than 10 Blackberries since I started using them in 2003. I was just as excited about the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Curve when they came out as I am about the iPhone. The Blackberry Storm however is ‘too little, too late’ for me.

Okay, one thing is cool: “At 3.2 megapixels, you can take sharp, print-quality pictures using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone. You can also rely on the auto focus and auto flash to help you capture the moment”. Just don’t forget to buy a few microSD cards because the only has 1GB of internal memory.

• How do we create an experience YOU enjoy?
• How can it get better with your participation?
• How can we empower people to share information with people that want that information?
• How can we improve the conversation?

Kevin described the gap he wanted Digg to fill as being placed between the filters of people you know, and an unfiltered mass audience. This gap, said Rose, would be filled by Digg in future with its recommendation engine, providing an intersection of your news, and news from ‘diggers like you’.

Digg’s traffic has grown by over 40% since July with the recommendation engine being the fuel for this, and they now plan to open up their taxonomy to allow dynamic grouping - the aim with this is to promote conversation amongst similar users.

Thus, a group can ‘reject’ a spammer or someone who is interrupting, and include those who make valuable contributions. In this way, an individual can ’show their impact’ to other users - as you Digg, it shows you the number of people like you who, in a dynamic group, you are sharing this with, or the number whom you are ‘denying’ seeing the story if you are ‘burying’ things you don’t think deserve an airing. Nice tool - why would you want to disappoint 3,421 people like yourself?

Digg also want to be a conduit to other places, like Twitter, Facebook etcetera. They are also developing and extending the recommendation API and tools for publishers. My immediate thought was that the publishers might welcome this, but it would depend who was branding (or monetising) the end delivery to the consumer.

Responding to questions at the end of his presentation, Rose revealed that Digg has plans to develop internationally, with Rose saying this will be a big initiative next year. One big reason for taking their last round of funding was expanding internationally to take on the local ‘Digg clones’ in the likes of Germany and Spain.”We’ll be moving servers overseas, and by Q4 2009, we will be addressing international markets.”

So watch out, looks like the Diggers will be the future of news. So, please Digg this story…

Strands.com has all the regular lifestream things going on: sign up, fill in the RSS feeds forms, and see the content popping up along the way. But the main advantage I was refer to earlier, is that you can filter somebody’s or your own content on its type. So if you have this great friend X, who makes the best songs, but sucks at writing. You can only check his songs (and trying not to hear the lyrics). Why didn’t Friendfeed come up with that? It’s just too logical.

There’s also a tab within Strands.com showing some recommendations and hot content from across the network. That’s were Strands is using its recommendation muscles and where we, users, can discover new stuff.

At least, that is when you’re one of the first hundred to grab an invite with our promotion code thenextweb. Go to Strands.com, click “request an invitation to join Strands” and use the promo code. You will then get an email with the invitation code.

If you think so then head on this website: Sad Guys on Trading Floors (hosted on Tumblr).

Have fun :)! (samples below)

They all made fun of Jim’s flag shirt. We’ll see who’s laughing when Jim SAVES THE MARKET! THESE COLORS DON’T RUN!

Hey Greg, check it out, I’m on top of the big sign! No, no, over here, the one that says Douche Borscht or whatever. See me? HI!

Mama Mia! That’s a’spicy meatball!

Hey guys, check this out. Some jerk made a joke blog about us.

(credits goes to Joe Weisenthal from Clusterstock for finding this)

This time I’m interviewing Jordan Goldman, founder and CEO of Unigo.com - a student-generated guide to North-American colleges. When I read an article about him in the New York Times magazine a few weeks ago, I was struck by his inspiring story. Jonathan Dee wrote the stunning piece like only a reporter from Eight Avenue can. It’s starts like this:

Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. “I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,” he remembered recently, “and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, ‘Get a job,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, I have this idea.’ ”

Let’s hear the rest of the story from the Wesleyan graduate himself. It’s kind of long, but I promise, you’ll be entertained.

How did you come up with the idea of Unigo?

“When I was 18, I created a series of 100% student-written college guidebooks, called Students’ Guide to Colleges’, that was published in a couple editions from Penguin Books. About a year after I stopped doing Students’ Guide, I started thinking about the limitations of print guidebooks – each college only got a small number of pages, with no photos, no videos, no interactivity …

For a four-year, $50,000 to $200,000 decision, one of the five most stressful decisions of people’s lives … I realized high school students and parents needed more accurate, authentic, honest information. And college students needed a place where they could really represent their college lives - if they loved their school, if they had issues with it, if they were someplace in-between. The internet provided the opportunity to create an enormous, comprehensive and totally free resource that could help everyone.

But it was really important that we create something that was actually representative. That we didn’t just sit back, open a review platform, and hope people came.

So what we did was, we hired an 18 person editorial team, and decided Unigo would initially cover 250 colleges. We spent about 3 months researching every one of those colleges. Then we hired interns on the ground, who really believed in what we were trying to accomplish and who helped corroborate our research. For the next 5 months, we reached out to current students one by one, telling them we wanted to create this giant and honest resource and asking them to be a part of it. We put in extra effort to ensure we received reviews from students from every major, extracurricular, gender, race, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation and more … students who love their school, who have issues with it, or have mixed feelings.

In the end, at 250 colleges, more than 15,000 students contributed more than 35,000 pieces of content. In some cases, a full 10% of the student body took part. And the value of having that volume of reviews is, if we have 150 reviews of a college, you can search by a variety of criteria. You can say, only show me reviews by English majors, or African American students, or politically right-wing students at a left-wing institution … so you can see a school from the eyes of someone who’s just like you.

Unigo launched on September 17th, and now that we’re live we’re a slightly different site for high school students and college students. If you’re a high school student, Unigo gives you access to an enormous amount of free and honest information about each college – editorial overviews, reviews, photos, videos, documents and more. Very soon, we’ll be adding blogs and forums to the mix.

And if you’re a college student, Unigo gives you all the tools you need to create content about your college life. Anyone with the right .edu email address can create content about their school. They can create reviews, videos, photos, upload class notes, academic writing, creative writing, campus journalism … write blogs, interact in forums, create profiles and message their classmates and other prospective students. It’s pretty exciting so far!

What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

“I think the biggest challenge was being able – and willing – to let the idea evolve as you go along. When the idea for Unigo first came about, I reached out to some of the smartest people I could find, and asked them if I could buy them lunch and run the idea past them. And, in the beginning, the idea had plenty of flaws. People would listen, and nod their head, then go on to rip it apart – “you didn’t think of this, what would you do in this scenario, this part doesn’t make sense.” Sometimes that can be hard to hear (especially if, like I was, you’re living only on your rapidly depleting savings, sleeping on couches and staying in strange sublets, with everyone telling you to get a real job – but you’re trying to keep at it, stick to it, doing whatever you can to get the idea off the ground.)

But in the end, it’s actually the best thing in the world, the people who pick your idea apart. You have to kind of put yourself aside, and listen to what they’re saying, then go home and take out your pen and try to say okay, they identified a hole, how do I fill that hole now? Once you’ve done that, ask them to sit down with you a month later and test out your patch, see if it holds. If it doesn’t, try again.

I’d say I probably had 50 or 100 of those lunches with smart people before we raised any money to create Unigo – trying out ideas, testing them, getting shot down and building them up. But you really do learn from that process. And your idea gets immeasurably stronger. Not being defensive, and letting myself learn from them, was one of the hardest – and most worthwhile – things that got done.

Also, last thing, you shouldn’t be afraid to share your idea because you think someone might steal it, because then it will never get better. Find as many really smart people as you can, tell them about it, and really listen to their feedback.

And who knows, maybe those conversations will even lead to your idea being funded and taken off the ground.

Can you describe NYC’s start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?

”I’ve actually never been to Silicon Valley, so can’t speak to what that experience is like. But New York City has a really great and amazingly supportive community. Right in proximity of the Flatiron building, where are office is located, there are hundreds of startups and online companies all within 20 blocks of one another. And in the center of the 20 blocks there’s this hamburger place called Shake Shack, that has amazing food, and all the different people from all the startups – this whole online ecosystem, everything from coders to designers to CEO’s to angel investors to VC’s – they all eat at Shake Shack all the time, and meet one another and hang out. I’ve just found it really helpful and welcoming. There’s also some great NYC startup blogs like Center Networks, and online communities like nextNY (founded by Charlie O’ Donnell, who’s the greatest), and angel networks like Angelsoft with David Rose and Nate Westheimer …

I’m babbling a bit, but I’ve really found the proximity and community and general good-naturedness, the real mentality of “how can we share knowledge and help one another out to create stuff that’s new and exciting and cool” … I think it’s pretty great.

What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?

“I think Unigo is a site that helps college students really represent themselves, create stuff about their college lives and share it …

And lets high school students and parents take this huge, expensive, terrifying decision … and turn it into something that’s fun and real and honest, and catered to who they … so they can make the best possible choice. It takes an old media product, these guidebooks that have been around for the past 50 years, and turns it into an expansive and evolving free resource that’s exponentially better than any book could be.

We also – there are a lot of review sites where anyone and everyone throws their two cents in. They’re not necessarily experts on the product, but there’s wisdom in the collective intelligence of all these people contributing.

Unigo’s in an interesting position, though. Because all the people creating our reviews really are experts – there’s no-one better suited to speak to what it’s like to live and learn at these institutions than current students. So it’s this enormous bank of true expert opinions and perspectives. We also have our editors, who have done months of research on every college and have that corroborated by our interns, read every review and create an overview of all our review content for each college (using quotes from student reviews, which hyperlink back to the full student review so words are never taken out of context.)

I think, as far as “user generated content” goes, there are a couple things we do at Unigo that hopefully add to that conversation.

You can make up this question yourself!

What’s the best part of having an office full of twenty-somethings?

Watching everyone face off against one another in Rock Band.