Five Minutes Ltd.

Ok here are some good news.

ShoutEm is selected into 7 minutes competition at  TMT.Ventures’08 Zagreb. FIve companies are selected from 35 companies. That’s what I’ve heard.

In the mean you can apply for our private beta testing at www.shoutem.com.

Next week we are at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin so you can meet us there if you want short demo of ShoutEm.

See you,

Viktor

ShoutEm team will go for a group visit to Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. It is a famous O’Reilly’s conference which takes place in New York, San Francisco, Tokyio and Berlin.

I guess that all European geeks will be hanging around. Nicole Simon had posted some info on other events taking place around Web 2.0 Expo. It seems that it will be very exciting during those days in Berlin.

Few of those:

• international Barcamp Berlin 3
• Facebook Dev Garage
• Techcrunch UK Meetup

I’m really looking forward meeting German geeks. I heard that Berlin is really a hot spot and that there is lot of interesting startups. we already met guys from aka-aki at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona.

In the mean time read some interesting links that Zemanta suggest to me while writing this :)

• The 100 Most Popular Web 2.0 Sites From Germany
• Wednesday: TechCrunch / CrunchGear Berlin Meetup
• Seedcamp goes to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
• Web 2.0 conferences in Europe

Well, we went for a Short visit to Slovenia. To meet Andrej from Noovo, guys from Zemanta and friends we met at business angles in Ljubljana Sosed.

Andrey show us Noovo in action and I really like what I have seen. Lot of features and pretty inovative stuff. I like those news agregation services because it is already very hard to follow all that infrmation and it will become harder and harder. Company which can provide best software for that purpose will be very sucesfull. I just hope that it wont be Google or some other large rotten company.

Also we have heard lot of first hand experience of doing business in Palo Alto. Pretty interesting stuff. Good luck to Andrey.

Zemanta guys are young full of energy. We have heard a lot from them about their technology etc… They develop mostly in Python. My favorite language :). They have a long road to go yet. But it seems that bloggers are adopting their plugin a lot.

And finnaly Sosed. Well these guys impressed us with knowledge and enthusiasm. That was the highlight of the day. The way how they pulled of Sosed business is quite impressive. Sosed is a service where you can get your computer fixed at home at no time. Nothing revolutionary but very very usefull :). They have applied all those Seth Godin tricks in promoting their busines, that we all have read.

And with Sosed we are considering few business options. So we will se what will happen out of it.

And at the end for your info we have not been shortlisted in Seedcamp. But that will not stop us. We are 100% sure about ShoutEm sucess. And all that good feedback so far keep us motivating. We will get more feedback from Seedcamo too. But I guess that competition was really tough.

See you all, stay tuned.

We did small research on Fire Eagle. It is a great service with really cool features. I was so excited about retrieving location via cell tower id. It feels so great that you can avoid any business with mobile operator.

However we have tested it in Zagreb and it does not have info on our cell tower ids. I guess thay need some time to gather data about it first.

Second thing is that you cannot use it as a white label API but your users have to have account on Yahoo FIre Eagle and let you use their data. I think that we will support that in Shout’Em but besides that we will use their geocoding and zonetag services internally for users which does not have Yahoo accounts.

So we have finished our Seedcamp application. We worked pretty hard in order to have functional prototype.

For that purpose we have recorded short video on Shout’Em current features. http://www.shoutem.com/video.html

And inspired by the Back of the napkin guy I have sketch this. I really like it. I guess I could work on that sketch for years :). Like Google on this video.

ShoutEm on the back of the napkin

Well we are quite busy these days. Working on Seedcamp prototype.

I guess that it want be so easy. Lot of good startups will apply.

http://blog.seedcamp.com/2008/08/voting-now-open-for-our-video-pitch.html

One of my favorites services Last.fm started to compensate artists. If this works out and I don’t see why it should not, it would be the greatest thing ever happened in music :). After Punk of course :)

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/lastfm-compensa.html

Imagine that bands can avoid labels completely. On Last.fm they have it all. Promotion, distribution, sales…

When I was a teenager I was listening music mostly form independent labels. We were putting money in envelopes with list of albums I want to buy and guys would send me back packages. And these days you just buy your music from Last.fm directly from artist. Nice :)

Other nice post from Seth Godin on Amazon kindle explains how the costs of music and books can dramatically be lowered this way. Also he predicts great future for Amazon Kindle and I agree with that. I think that Kindle is great device. It is not so hyped as iTunes or iPhone but it is definitely not a geek device with limited market as iPhone.

So conclusion. Books and music cheap and at any place. Isn’t that great. When I remember that I had to wait for two weeks to get Nirvana album on a tape:)

And it is a nice way to make publishers run out of their business :)

1. I really believe that mobile social networking is only social networking that makes sense. I want to socialize on the go not while working.

2. Microsoft will kill Google in next five years. I saw them coming back from dead several times and I see they have big motivation to do that in search too. They definitely have he power. And besides that lately it seems that things at Google are breaking apart.

3. Cloud computing is greatest thing lately. I wish that Microsoft does the same thing as Amazon with Ruby on Rails but ten times better.

4. We still need database in the cloud :)

Broken google image I have pulled in using Zemanta :). Now I’m waiting will it pull out link on zemanta web site. Updating… No. Hm they should hard code link to Zemanta to always show :) One more update …. No. Ok I will paste it manually :) http://www.zemanta.com/