Twingly Strengthens Its Board With Niclas Heurlin and Björn Jeffery
Twingly, a Sweden based blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but a spam free one and aimed at the European market, strengthens its board with two new board members: Niclas Heurlin and Björn Jeffery.
Mr. Heurlin has been CEO of inWarehouse and has a lot of experience of e-commerce business. He’s senior partner and founder of Enferno AB and is a member of Twingly’s, Ztorm’s and Yacht Equipments board of directors
Mr. Jeffery is the CEO and strategist at Good Old and has earlier been working at SVT, Sydsvenskan and Göteborgs-Posten. He brings a lot of insight and experience in social media and understanding of media companies to Twingly.
As was pointed out in the Twingly's blog comments it is great to see that companies start to appreciate competence over age and bring in younger board members as well. This is not the obvious thing to do, but a crucial one if a company aims to build something for the younger generations. We hope to see more of this across the board in the Northern-European startup market. Experience that comes with age has it place in the Board of Directors, but the smartest companies build a mix to make sure they get the full advantage.
(The video interview was captured at the 24 Hour Business Camp, where Twingly CEO, Martin Källström, tell about their service and their latest product, microblog search engine)
Edit: Big thanks to Paula Marttila for the superb filming.
Twingly Expands To Germany
Twingly, a Swedish blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but a spam free one and aimed at the European market, is expanding to Germany. Recently Twingly landed its first German customer for its flagship product, Twingly Blog Stream, a service that shows which bloggers have written about each article on the newspaper's website, when it signed a deal with the leading business newspaper Handelsblatt.
Twingly has been launching many much talk about services lately and is now pushing strong into a major European market with Twingly Blog Stream. This is no small feat as according to Twingly's CEO, Martin Källström, "[...] German blogosphere is one of Europe's largest, it's an important market for us. Our search engine, covers nearly half a million blogs in German."
After landing the German deal Twingly has its Blog Stream service on 75 major media sites in no less than 11 countries all around Europe.
Martin Källström boldly claims that Twingly's goal is to be the number one blog search engine in Europe, adding that currently more than a quarter of the company's turnover is from other countries than Sweden, but that he expects that the percentage will grow to nearly 80 percent.
One easily gets the false idea that they are aiming to build a #1 landing site for (blog) Search like Google's. This is never meant to but be there in the background when all the money will be collected from partnering with all the major media sites that have all the eyeballs across the continent. A smart, lucrative and at least so far a successful strategy.
Twingly Sees The Forest From The Trees With Microblog Search
Twingly announced yesterday that they have launched a microblogging search engine that can search across the most used microblogging services; Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca and lots more.
What makes this a game changer in my opinion is that Twingly has created the microblog search engine for the rest of the world. Fair enough, Twitter is the de facto microblog and it has gained a lot of traction even in the Nordics, there is still quite a bit of potential in the other platforms especially for corporate users. Martin Kallström, the CEO, confirmed to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch integration with FriendFeed is on the way - one of the most popular threaded microblogs around.
Twingly's microblog search works exactly the same way as does their normal blog search. A simple black search field and results that you can vote on to give relevance points to the most approriate blog posts. In essence, if you think of it - Twingly has integrated the wiki search that Google is still playing with into their product's core.
What I mean by the title of the blog post is the fact that when you are looking for conversations on certain keywords, you want to be able to search all conversations - not limit it to a single service. Search engines and filters to seek the relevant content will become more and more important in the future for corporations looking into ways to tap into customer dialogue. If Twingly is able to package this in an appealing way to the corporations wanting to tap into the groundswell, they could have an easily capitalisable product on their hands.
