A great video featuring congressman Ron Paul - anti Iraq, truly libertarian and hugely popular on the internet right now.
Google trends Ron Paul vs. Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama
Show us your support for Ron Paul here:
Ein sehr interessanter Beitrag ist soeben auf der Seite der NZZ Online erschienen. Er zeigt auf, wie anhand von Smartvote die Streuung der Kandidaten einzelner Parteien auf den Achsen liberal-konservativ sowie rechts-links bestimmt werden kann.
Dabei zeigt sich folgendes Bild:
Interessant ist zu sehen, wie weit (oder eben nahe) sich die gewählten Nationalräte innerhalb der Parteien voneinander befinden.
Hier ist die CVP die zerstreuteste Partei mit drei Exponenten im SVP Lager und einigen doch sehr sozialistischen Nationalräten.
Auch die FDP ist zerstreut, allerdings weniger stark mit klarem Fokus im oberen rechten Quadranten. (Ich war übrigens knapp hinter Ruedi Noser der 2. liberalste Kandidat des Kantons ZH). Einige driften doch recht stark in den SVP Quadranten (z. B. Pierre Triponez)
Angesichts der Auswechslungsplänen im Bundesrat wäre es hoch interessant zu wissen, wo sich die Bundesräte befinden.
robwebb2k did a manual calculation of facebook penetration in different countries using the facebook flyer pro tool, which nicely indicates how many people you are reaching with certain demographic selection, like male/female - single/in a relationship or even favorite band or movie.
Here are the results:
As you can see, the penetration in Canada has reached an absolutely unbelievable 22%. More than every 5th Canadian is on Facebook - more than any political party for example has voters.
Extremely high penetration is also reached in Norway, where about 19% of the population is already on facebook.
If you look at other European numbers, Switzerland has a quite high penetration of 1.32 %, much higher than it’s neighbors France, Germany or Italy. Probably due to the internationality of our country.
How much longer until we reach 20% in Switzerland?
When are votes going to be cast over facebook or official government decisions broadcast? I bet you can reach more people than through traditional media.
You know you’re wasting to much time surfing facebook, reading articles on digg and looking at your stats? Want to use your time more efficiently?
Well looks like Tony Wright, founder of Jobby (sold to jobster.com), has come up with a great software to do measure your activities, at least those that you with your computer. The software has the promising name Rescuetime.
It’s a hybrid web app with a small software for your windows or mac (no linux version yet) that tracks your active window every 5 seconds. The data is then uploaded every 30 minutes to the rescuetime webserver (both time settings can be changed according to your needs). Online you are then able to see which websites and which software you’ve been using for how long. On top of that, you can tag the websites / programs with your personalized tags, i.e. communication for your email, IM, and social networks. This allows you to see very quickly where you spend the most of your time, and again can help you set goals to reach certain work / waste ratios.
The GUI of the software is already great and I can already see Rescuetime become one of my new time wasters, due to it’s addictive character.
On top of that, they announced exciting new features yet to come:
Rescuetime is still in private beta, but invites are being sent out every day, so I suggest you sign up for the invite list if you are interested in testing Rescuetime.
Overall, I can say that Rescuetime is a very cool software with great potential. I am recommending it to my business partners and friends and I’ll definitely be using it myself: I can already see it making me more productive since a report about my activities is being sent to my hyperproductive friend, who will not hesitate to scold me when necessary.
As I blogged before, we put our job ad for a php developer on the Xing Marketplace.
Now I just received an email from Xing telling me that they are going to start charging for use of the Xing marketplace, but contrary to already established job sites like stepstone, they charge on a per click basis rather than on a per ad basis. This will make a lot of sense to headhunters and HR people who can have a much better ROI overview, similar to google Adsense.
One click costs 0.49 € and might drive strong additional revenue to xing. The job ad I mentioned before has had 20 clicks in 48 hours = 10 clicks a day.
This would bring an additional 150 € to Xing for a job ad that runs for a month (usual length). Other job ads have much higher click rates, as suggests the marketplace startpage: 2383 clicks for the most popular one ( = 1 167.67 € for Xing ).
In the last 48 hours there were at least 350 new job ads. Assuming that people continue to use Xing marketplace even though they have to pay as of today, and assuming those job ads have the same clickthrough rates I have, this would mean 175 * 10 * 30 = 52k clicks a day or 26k € of revenues a day. Yearly this amounts to almost 10 Mio €. Not bad for Xing, which would mean they could augment their revenues by 50+ % with one move. They made 8.2 Mio € in the first semester of 2007.
What I like about Xing is that they are not trying to monetize their platform with ads. They are providing helpful service that generates return on investment for it’s users. They are making up to 20 Mio € Revenue (expected for this year) with only 4 Mio members, meaning that each member spends 5 € p.a. on average. Corresponds approximately to the 13 % premium member rate.
Imagine they had the facebook number of users, 40+ Mio, they would do 200 Mio € in revenue, more than 280 Mio $! Compared to the rumored 150 Mio $ of facebook, they are extracting double the amount of money from their users! Xing is doing great on the monetization, really.
Their P/E is around 60 (190 market cap / 3 mio profit), making it a bit more expensive than Google (53.29), but still much less expensive than Baidu for example (P/E = 180). With their new revenue source, this company might just make quite a lot more revenue, so maybe their are not that expensive, after all.
[Disclosure: I own Xing shares]
Remo and I just decided to sponsor our first listing on facebook marketplace.
Trigami is looking for PHP Crack to help further improve their products and their platform.
If you know PHP by heart and Mysql while you’re asleep, this one is for you:
PHP Crack für heisses Startup: Trigami
As you can see on the link above, this is also my first job ad on Xing, the usability has again convinced me. But I had only 3 views since this morning when I posted it, in that is rather little. So what is it good for to have 8 fields (salary, qualifications, position, time percentage etc.) describing the job, when your job is not found anyhow? Let’s hope the number of views will increase over time.
On the other hand, we decided to sponsor our listing on facebook for just 4$ in the networks Switzerland and ETH Zurich for one dollar each and then we bought 500 flyers for both networks for another 1$. Let’s see if the clickthrough rates are any good.
This afternoon (morning in New York) Google’s stock hit the symbolic value of 600$ a share. It opened for $85 in 2004 and has thus created a 7x return on investment for its earliest public investors. The market capitalization of Google - 186.53 bn $ - is slowly but steadily approaching Microsoft’s 279.70 bn $ valuation.
Contrary to the currently much hyped social networks and as much hyped facebook applications, Google generates real money: 1,104.62 bn $ of operating income in the last quarter alone. On top of that they have 10′000 of engineers researching and building new products. And what Google does right: they hire the smartest people they can find and go great lengths to find and keep them (ever heard of free massage, free hair dresser, 24/7 access to the office or free gourmet dining at your workplace?) . Take a look for example at the following Google recruitement video.
In an intriguing blog post, seobook’s Aaron Wall describes how Google could leverage the huge amount of information it’s gathering every day to make predictions on stock markets .
It’s very true that Google has access to almost everything that’s happening on the web. How about a (paying?) service that tracks specific patterns in Google searches and Blog Posting and an analysis of Google Finance usage to create an instant trend recognizer?
In a very interesting article, the New York Times talks about several developers-entrepreneurs who are building facebook applications and try to earn money with it. And really no application is reporting profits. Most people can barely cover their server costs.
A couple of reasons why it is so hard to monetize an application:
A lot of people are building applications just for the fun of it. But how can people with a VC in their back make apps that much better than the 1000 of developers who code for free?
The only people that are making money with facebook apps right now are people that are selling advertisment in their apps for other people’s apps (like google adsense in a way with pay per install/click ). And that’s certainly not sustainable.
The facebook applications are in an extreme hype. Facebook only VC’s like Lee Lorenzen certainly help the fantasies
growing.
Update: Viadeo has now removed the unfriendly comment from their website on the link posted in the comment below. Here’s the google cached version of the comment:
Viadeo spam
I have no desire to become a member of Viadeo. I currently receive on the order of several dozen requests daily: **SOMEONE_I_DON’T_KNOW** invites you to join the Viadeo network Hello, I have the pleasure to invite you to join me on Viadeo, the business and social networking website that works. Over the past 2 years, over 1,250,000 people have already joined Viadeo and the network is expanding at over 3,000 new members every day! - etc.- Despite several emails addressed to abuse@viadeo.com …
None - California
Published by No Spam
Published on 02 August 2007 - 2 people interested
I also found this link: http://twitter.com/tv/statuses/298470912, confirming the issue.
I just received the following email:
Sophie Plantieux invites you to join the Viadeo network
Hi,I’d like to invite you to be part of my Viadeo network.
I use Viadeo to manage my professional contacts and get in touch with other people in my industry. Give it a look : it has paid off for me.
Kind regards,
Sophie Plantieux
Registration only takes a few minutes !
I want to joinPlease join now by clicking on the above link.
PS: By inviting your contacts to join your network on Viadeo you increase your networking opportunities exponentially. Some Internet Service Providers deactivate html links. If this is your case, to accept this invitation simply copy and paste this address in your Internet browser:
http://www.viadeo.com/action/index.jsp?actionId
=002p15toal6zhez&urlId=0021v1e4bjtkdcp0
That looks like an ugly spam message to me. Because neither do I know a Sophie Plantieux nor does that person seem to exist, according to google at least. She has a Viadeo account with 19 contacts and a Xing account but with no contacts. This is a tactic that could likely backfire, just wait until a couple of bloggers receive those emails and you will have a mess. On the other hand, bad press is also press, so they might just be waiting for that. Or is it a jealous competitor who is sending emails in their names? The email came from a gmail address, so it can not be proven that it is from viadeo themselves.
Now they boast 1.6 Mio members, almost half of the 4 Mio users that Xing has. Could they be a serious competitor to Xing? I haven’t seen that many French on Xing, they’re mostly on Linkedin and heck - maybe even on viadeo!
Looks like Xing got a good foothold into the spanish market with their acquisitions. But what about the rest of Europe?
As you may have noticed on your Xing account, they introduced a new feature that helps better describe your past. You can now add what you were responsible for at a specific job and what kind of company it is. This is something that Linkedin has been offering since years and is no technological challenge to implement.
Xing has done a nice job adding some ajax layers to facilitate editing. The usability of Xing is great, and they’re doing everything to make it even better.
On the other hand, linkedin has finally introduced profile pictures, a feature Xing has been offering since their start.
Those small tweaks are necessary and help the main professional social networks keep up with others like facebook. While they might not like each other that much, they should maybe be more worried about facebook when they introduce their friend grouping feature.
Flavio Rump is a Web Entrepreneur from Zurich and currently working with Stefetage 
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