Open id & Jyte

Just a quick post on a new service - Jyte (see example below) that leverages OpenID. OpenID is an open standard for id-services, a bit comparable to what Microsoft tried with passport. A service that let's you securily log in at several sites with the same id. Great idea - now let's see if it works. I do believe that such a standard should rise - either open or by a commercial player - I get crazy of all the login's and passwords!!!

To just give an example of the Jyte service:

Marktplaats nu op de kaart

Zo net gelanceerd - Marktplaats Kaartoverzicht. Met deze nieuwe functionaliteit kun je zoeken via de kaart, op landelijk niveau maar ook op straatniveau. Leuke extra is de mogelijkheid in je buurt te zoeken - eens even kijken wat er vlakbij wordt aangeboden :)

Met deze ontwikkeling lijkt Marktplaats nog meer in te zetten op "lokaal" zoeken. Het zoeken op afstand bestond al en werd ook in de televisie reclame naar voren gehaald. En er was ook al een uitbereiding van Marktkijker (dat ook van marktplaats is) met Marktkijker Lokaal. Nu komt daar dus de kaartfunctie op Marktplaats bij.

Vertical Search - Cars

One of the predictions many have made and I definitly believe in is that we will see an explosion of vertical search engines in 2007. I will try to keep track of as many (new) launches as I can. Here's a start with the cars vertical...

Last week saw the launch of a Dutch Cars search engine with the funny name "gaspedaal.nl" (accelerator). This site is launched by the company behind vinden.nl and zoeken.nl. This follows the launch of a Cars-(search) vertical in december by Yahoo, although Yahoo Cars carries a lot of content as well. I also expect other Dutch companies to come with a Car search engine soon. Funny fact; "rempedaal.nl" (brake) was registered on february 7 by classifieds site Marktplaza which also owns classifieds vertical search engine Advertentiezoeker (thanks for the tip JK!!). Apparently vinden.nl wasn't alert enough to register this domain as well.

UPDATE: A very alert Sebastiaan Ambtman alerted me that Marktplaza is actually a partner in the project - thanks seb!

Launch event at IPAN

This evening IPAN organised a launch party at which several start-ups presented themselves. Very good to see the start-up spirit and a lot of these new webcompanies present themselves. I particularly liked the following:

Fleck - they already got a lot of coverage and of course they were present tonight at this "homeparty" for Boris and Patrick (the founders). For the people that missed the buzz around fleck's launch; fleck is a so-called annotation service. Do check out their product! Really looking forward to the social networking functions fleck will offer soon...

Leadz.nl - a nice services platform that mimicks the "old" letsbuyit.com but then for products. People can either co-shop or just put their request out so that service providers can bid on it. Nice move into services!

ToMap - also a cool new service: it allows people to find and select events on Google Maps. It is an open site and anyone can add events to the map/system. A nice new feature is that you can download a KML file of the event (to your mobile phone) which contains the location info for the mobile version of Google maps

Swoot - I also met Swoot on the innovation playground event in November and they have a great product for your browser. They have developed software that enables you to build a (branded) skin for your internet explorer but it really looks like a different browser or some kind of widget. Really nice to see and it can even adapt it's skin to the site you're browsing. Really cool innovation.

There we're a lot of other nice startups like; start12, blogads, rasasa (which I'm already a happy user of), originalsignal, 14dayz, yelloyello (social, web2.0 version of the yellow pages), watvindenwijover.nl, muziekkaart.nl, sharecare and others. Do check out their sites.

It was a nice event with a quite a good number of people. Well done event IPAN!

Glimpse of the future

Well the letters IN & T in Yecinto are for innovation and trends, so it's time for a little update from the future:

• The future of financial markets - a report from 2015 looking back
• 
  EPIC - a future scenario reported out of 2014 about (social) media
  

Meanwhile I have found this great jewel of a blog by two futurologists (in dutch) with some great content and movies:

"Extend Limits"

Enjoy and let me know what you think!!

Picking on Yahoo

It seems in fashion to criticize Yahoo these days. They almost look like the poor little guy in class that all others pick on. Not entirely fair I think; although they need to get their act together on lot's of things, there's also a lot of great things happening at Yahoo - both internationally as well as locally.

On the one hand some things are really going wrong - the stock price is in decline, the new search ad-system panama was delayed and some peanut butter loving top managers in the company felt Yahoo needed a change.

On the other hand there are great things happening - Yahoo answers is a great success, silently following the growth pattern of PR baby Youtube. I also think Yahoo is busy with a smart acquisition strategy - buying key properties/technologies early in their development but picking out the right ones like Flickr, delicious etc. And Panama has now rolled in the US and will hit other markets really soon.

More locally here in the Netherlands Yahoo had two separate units (kelkoo and YSM) working pretty much apart and YSM was losing quite some of the big deals with publishers - which led to disappointing results for the advertisers on their network (mainly in volume). But 2007 must become a nice year; panama will roll in the Netherlands in the 1st half of the year, the Kelkoo and YSM teams are now combined under a new manager and Yahoo is starting to role new products into the Dutch market; like Yahoo Cars which just launched or the upcoming NL version of Yahoo answers.