Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.
Swedish Twingly have been building up the hype since early June when they first announced Project Shinobi, the working name for Twingly Channels we then got a sneak preview of for a month ago at the Sweden Social Web Camp. And they certainly are reaching for the stars, or as Martin Källström, CEO Twingly, puts it:
”Twingly Channels lets people cut out the noise of online search and the real-time web — to instantly see what news and content to spend time on. By following topics rather than bloggers or outlets, Twingly simplifies the challenge of RSS, social search, and the real-time web.“
There’s no “One way” to do search. Traditional search engines compete for space and co-exist with nisched, inspirational, visual, social and now with the latest trending topic, real-time search. As the blogosphere with user generated content keeps growing, the search space keeps expanding with it. Our personal online presence increases through social networking etc. which means we need to keep track of our own digital footsteps, preferably real-time.
Regardless of the lack of an existing business model, search remains a very attractive space, and within past three months, three Swedish players have been added to the fields of nisched, visual and real-time search.
To continue our ArcticEvening tour around Northern Europe we will be organising an ArcticEvening in Copenhagen, Denmark on 24th June. The date is set so that it is in the eve of the awesome reboot conference.
We have still some 20 tickets or so left and you can reserve your free ticket here or at below. Go get your now!
We are going with a different format this time (no panel) and want to bring out all the best startups in the region. We have a amazing line up coming.
Here’s the list of startups that will be presenting (we also might add a few extra appearances). The presentations start at 18.30 sharp(!), so be there in time. Continue reading »
Twingly, the Swedish blog search engine, announced earlier this afternoon that as of October 1st they will be shifting into the next gear by launching “what will become the next great platform for social media“.
Obviously they’ve not just been adding new flags to their partner list, but also busy cooking new stuff in the Twingly kitchen, or as to put it in their own words (The Announcement):
“With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use.”
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, 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.”
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 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.
Twinglyannounced recently the largest website in Norway VG Nett with over 2.5 million unique visitors each week launched Twingly Blogstream on their site. VG Nett hopes to enrichen the articles on their site by showing links to good blog posts related to the topic of the article. They also wish to give more attention to “clever bloggers out there”. Twingly now has the top two largest Norwegian newspapers as partners, VG.no and Dagbladet.no.
With our expanding focus to other Nordic countries, we’d like to start the round by taking a look at a Swedish startup, whose founders I had a chance to meet last year in Paris’ LeWeb3 – they’re called Twingly.
Twingly is a blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but they claim it to be spam free. One of the ways this is achieved is a social rating to the blog posts in a similar fashion to Digg – the more popular the blog post, the higher it will rank in search results.
Twingly was launched in February 2007 and according to their history, Svd.se and DN.se, two of the largest Swedish newspapers began using their service Blogstream to link back to blogs writing about their articles. Since then, they have made deals with more than 40 European partners to begin using their Blogstream to link back to blogs. Finland’s largest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, is also using this feature at the bottom of their articles.
With a focus on creating cash flow and adding more partners to their business – there has been a slight underfocus on product development. Twingly’s product line is composed of the Blogstream and a screensaver that visually displays the state of the blogosphere.
They aren’t giving out too many statistics on where they are with regards to blogs pinging their service, but they are open in other ways. For example, they have opened up their Tech Plan to the public so that people can vote on what features and tools ought to be added in the future – crowdsourcing at its finest!
With regards to finances, I’m guessing Twingly is making a profit as their deals with the regular media houses aren’t poorly priced. They also have 9 people to support with the tech, so the costs shouldn’t be that high. Nevertheless, I’d hate to see them lose the entrepreneurial thrive if they do make a nice profit – they have a lot of potential around this idea as Technorati isn’t all that common in Europe.
Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.
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