Internet
Yay, I’m 254th on Wikio
The Internet is all about metrics, so while blog rankings have never obsessed me, I do pay attention.
Traffic over my blog has steadily increased as I post more regularly, but funny things seem to happen with external measures of popularity.
1- Plunging on Technorati
Founded by blog pioneer David Sifry, Technorati has long been considered the gateway to blogging. You can search, tag and get an idea of what they call your “authority”. Since moving to Asia to blog, however, my Technorati authority has plunged. This is despite my more frequent postings and more numerous links to this blog. I imagine this is because the Asian blogs linking to me do not have the authority of the US and European blogs that would link to me when I was writing about European technology. When I came to Asia my Technorati authority started at around 250 or so, but it has now plunged to around 120.
View blog authority
2- Steady on Google
My Google rank has remained unchanged at 5 for quite some time.
3- Rising on Wikio
The trigger for this posting was a note from Wikio, a French-based company that ranks blog postings. They sent an email to tell me that this blog had just reached 254th on their list of technology blogs worldwide. Thanks, guys!
The company describes Wikio as:
Wikio is the number 1 news aggregator in Europe, indexing over 55,000 English-language sources. We have only recently launched our Top Blog rankings, and many blogs such as Freakonomics are adding their badges. We have designed our rankings so as to make them the most comprehensive on the Internet - you can check them out in full and get more details on how they are compiled at http://www.wikio.com/blogs/top/technology
Any other ranking I should look at?
UPDATE: Wow! CNReviews today did a full assessment of their blog stats. Very impressive and complete. They have done extremely well in a short period of time. Well done!
Vivek Wadhwa
Vivek Wadhwa is a Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University who specializes in studying innovation in business. He was formerly a tech entrepreneur who founded two tech companies.
His studies, published at Globalization Research, have included looking at the level of innovation in China, the relative gap in engineers graduated when comparing India/China and the US (His studies controversially assert that the US does not have such a huge deficit of engineers) and a study showing that the number of Indians and other immigrants in Silicon Valley is not as great as many presume.
Mr. Wadhwa writes a column for Businessweek and enjoys aiming to debunk popular notions and perceived wisdom.
Vivek Wadhwa: China is NOT the new Silicon Valley
While William Bao Bean said in a recent interview that we should Expect More Digital Garages in China, Vivek Wadhwa disagrees, asserting that China is not innovating and has still has not moved beyond copycat status.
“China is simply unable to innovate,” said Wadhwa, a Harvard fellow and Duke University professor. A former technology entrepreneur, Wadhwa now specializes in studying business creativity and innovation.
China’s tech economy is built on copycats that totally lack any sort of innovation, particularly given the amount of money spent on research and development by companies and the government in China, Wadhwa said.
As to Bao Bean’s assertion that creativity and digital garages will be inspired in part by the high level of investment brought in by foreign venture capitalists, Wadhwa said: “There is a lot of money being wasted by a lot of VCs in China.”
China’s younger generation is extremely creative, but those running China’s research and development are not bringing anything new, Wadhwa said.
Asked for numbers to back this assertion, Wadhwa said that the numbers tell the exact opposite story. China files a large number of patents and produces a large number of research-related papers, but there are few actual innovations coming out.
Nonetheless, those good number hide a total lack of creativity, based on Wadhwa’s qualitative analysis.
Wadhwa said the exact opposite seems to be true in India, where relatively little is invested in research and development. India has fewer patents and papers than China, but the country is building itself into a innovation powerhouse.
The fundamental difference, Wadhwa said, is that Indian engineers are encouraged to think beyond their narrow role and build more innovation into their activities.
More Searches from China, but Koreans Search more often
South Korea’s Internet searchers conducted an average of 104 searches in April, nearly twice as many as Malaysians, who clocked in at 54 searches per searcher in April, according to Comscore’s latest findings.
Perhaps the Malaysians should help the South Koreans find what they are looking for?
Asia’s largest number of searches, not surprisingly, came from the 82 million Chinese Internet users doing 6.2 billion searches in April.
That is an average of 75 searches per Chinese searcher.
Search intensity get even more interesting with China vs Japan:
Japan’s 60 million Internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher). Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.
Another aspect of Asia’s Internet shown by the Comscore report is how local search sites challenge Google and Yahoo.
Across Asia, Google sites have a 39.1 percent share and Yahoo sites have a 24 percent share, but five of the region’s top ten search properties are local, including China’s Baidu.com (16.7 percent) and Korea’s NHN Corporation (5.3 percent), which owns search engine Naver.com.
The report adds:
Chinese properties Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.
Govt: No blogger accreditation in Hong Kong
Hong Kong does not recognize bloggers for accreditation to official media events, Betty Fung, the Hong Kong government’s Director of Information Services, told me today.
(Fung, the top spokesperson for the government, is seated next to Ersnt Herb, the recently elected president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong.)
The lack of blogger accreditation in Hong Kong stands in contrast to India, the US and many others governments and companies that recognize bloggers as important purveyors of information.
But Fung said the issue is not about keeping bloggers out of government press conferences: She has never received a request for accreditation from a blogger.
“We are constantly reviewing our policy for access to media events and keep them as open as possible - sometimes even to students,” Fung said. “The thing is that I don’t think we have ever received a request for access from a blogger.”
Are Hong Kong bloggers apolitical or does a vibrant blogging community about politics only exist with full democracy?
Any bloggers coming to cover the equestrian olympic events in Hong Kong?
Ken Carroll: How to learn Chinese using Web 2.0
The Internet - and Web 2.0 tools in particular - are extremely well suited to language teaching, explains Ken Carroll, co-founder of Chinesepod.com in this video.
Carroll’s Shanghai-based company (which I use to learn Mandarin) employs Web 2.0 methods to teach Chinese and a growing range of other languages.
To see why Carroll thinks Web 2.0 works so well, you need to see the process of a typical student: me!
I usually begin a new topic listening to a radio show-style hosted podcast in which two presenters introduce a dialogue. I then listen to another podcast that reviews vocabulary before I get to a third podcast in which I can listen to the dialogue alone several times. (I do all this while at the gym or going to the office)
After listening to the podcast, you can go on the Chinesepod website and play a variety of games with the vocabulary from that lesson.
In terms of which lesson you choose, there is no order. I usually just start with the most recent lesson. Some lessons make reference to recent events, while other lessons are less time sensitive.
To Carroll, that is the key insight of using the Internet for language teaching: Students have a framework in which to explore topics that are of interest to them.
“You have a personalized studying framework, but the student is free to explore any topic or information that interests them,” Carroll said. “Language takes on an exploratory approach.”
To Carroll, this fits with the way children learn language - based on the child’s experience and interests.
Nokia acquires Felix Petersen’s Plazes
Congrats, Felix!
For anyone unfamiliar with Plazes, the service allows mobile telephones to know their location and interact with others on the basis of that information. In other words, this buy will enable Nokia to introduce location-based services and features.
Nokia to acquire social-activity service provider Plazes
Connecting People just got easier with services that track place and time
Espoo, Finland and Berlin, Germany - Nokia and Plazes (www.plazes.com) today announced an agreement for Nokia to acquire substantially all assets of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company of 13 people with its principal operations in Berlin. Plazes provides a context-aware social-activity service that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities: why they are at a given location at a given time, whether in the past, present or future.
“This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy,” said Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software. “In addition to the key assets, through this acquisition Nokia will bring on a visionary team with an advanced understanding of social-activity services, as well as the technical ability to further develop this area.”
By acquiring Plazes, Nokia will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features. Plazes adds the elements of “place” and “time” to social networking through features that allow people to alert friends of their activity and location; review their own and others’ past activities; share their experiences and make plans with friends, who are then able to respond with comments and suggestions as well as their own location information.
“Nokia shares our vision of the social activity space and of how we can together develop the service that Plazes provides today,” said Felix Petersen, co-founder of Plazes. “We feel proud of what the Plazes team has achieved so far with its pioneering work in context-aware services and we feel even more excited about what’s to come next.”
The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the third quarter 2008. After closing, Plazes will become part of Nokia’s Services & Software unit.
About Plazes
Plazes AG is one of the pioneering web platforms for location sharing and publishing on the web today. Members of Plazes are able to update their location through their laptop or mobile phone, and update their online presence with their current, past and future whereabouts. That way Plazes provides location-based context and real-life value when coordinating with friends, family and business partners. Plazes AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland with a development office in Berlin, Germany. For additional information, please visit www.plazes.com.
About Nokia
Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. We make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Developing and growing our offering of consumer Internet services, as well as our enterprise solutions and software, is a key area of focus. We also provide equipment, solutions and services for communications networks through Nokia Siemens Networks.
Media Enquiries:
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Nicolas Kourganoff / Nadège Poutrel / Célina Da Silva / Charlotte Dondain
Tel : + 33 1 49 15 15 15
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Chinesepod: Rare backstage tour with Hank Horkoff
This quick tour of the Chinesepod offices in Shanghai with Hank Horkoff reveals many secrets of the highly popular Web 2.0 Chinese-language learning service.
Launched by a web expert (Horkoff) and a language teaching expert (Ken Carroll), Praxis Language Ltd has evolved into an office of Babel, with language teachers from Shanghai now using their Web 2.0 platform to offer lessons in Spanish, Italian, French and more languages on the way.
In this video you can see the school’s set up and studios, while also hearing a little bit about Ken Carroll’s idea that the web creates super-enabled teachers with star-quality. (We agree in your case, of course, Ken.)
A couple more videos coming soon on their novel language teaching ideas and interesting business model.
Disclosure: I have subscribed to Chinesepod since I started learning Chinese and find their podcasts extremely useful.
William Bao Bean: Expect More Digital Garages in China
Long belittled for ripping off Silicon Valley’s successes pixel-for-pixel, China’s web entrepreneurs are now starting innovate, argues William Bao Bean, former analyst at Deutsche Bank and now partner at Softbank China and India Holdings.
Why?
1- Ecosystem - For the first time China now has the large crop of bloggers, VCs and entrepreneurs necessary for business creation.
2- Foreign VCs - Silicon Valley VCs have now actually started setting up shop in China, something they have not done in any other country. William cited as an example his own fund, which is the third Softbank-backed fund in China.
3- In China, less is more - A good idea in Silicon Valley will attract several hundred thousand dollars in angel investment, while a Chinese equivalent will attract one quarter that. The good news: “You can get a lot further on US$50,000 in China than you can with US$200,000 in the US,” William said. A US$30,000 per month burn rate in China is equivalent to a US$300,000 burn rate in Silicon Valley.
To support his argument William cites a company that he recently joined, iTalki, as an example of a Chinese company innovating on a global scale. iTalki is a language exchange site with a global user base that supports more than 100 possible languages. While it does copy some good ideas from other sites, William claims iTalki is the world’s leading language exchange of its kind.
William’s conclusion: “You will soon see an awful lot more digital garages in China.”
What do you think? Do you agree?
Inma Martinez: 7 tips for tech entrepreneurs
Had a great day hanging out with entrepreneur Inma Martinez this Sunday. In addition to being one of the few people I know with a favorite pet dinosaur, Inma founded and CEO-ed a number of tech start-ups, often in relation with 3i. Time magazine named her one of the top people in European technology and she is currently business development strategist at Associated Northcliffe Digital.
Inma offered 7 tips for entrepreneurs:
1- Hold no meeting longer than 30 minutes.
2- Insist that everyone think through solutions to their problems that can either get a “yes” or “no”.
3- When dealing with younger employees, make them clones of yourself, following the model of a Michelin chef. Give them the recipe so that they know how you like your omelette and can make it over and over again. It will make them comfortable in know what you expect. Once they know how to make that one omelette, they will start improving on the omelette in ways you could never have expected.
4- Start work at 8am, so that you get things done before everyone arrives.
5- Switch off (mobile phone OFF) at 7pm to learn a language or pursue interests outside work.
6- Stay friends with everyone, including investors who drop you. Life can take strange turns.
7- Embrace change, since it always brings opportunity.
Inma just reacted to this blog posting to add the following:
From my days teaching high school in NYC and Spain I am most keen on the “Tao of the How”
You teach students how to resolve a math problem, how to dissect a Shakespeare play, how to train for track and field competitions… at school, it’s all about the How of Life.
Why should work be different?
Employees and teams get great release from pressure when their leader explains not just what they want done, but how:
They do not need to fret and stress hoping that their guess matches your expectations, so they concentrate totally on execution.
As a leader I care HOW people go about their tasks or else we run into trouble: Insider trading, overworking and staying in the office late.
For me, if someone has to do work too late, etc in order to deliver something for me, there is something awfully wrong.
By teaching the How of Work you are teaching Best Practice which is the best skill one can learn in the work place.
I hope people react to this and offer their own tips and comments on mine!
Debate is so enriching!!!
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