How Linux Got To China And The Nordic Open Source Miracle
‘’The markets are on the web, the production power is on the web, both globally available for everyone’’ Mårten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems.
Let’s do a small intellectual play: Web 2.0 services, or the current generation’s internet companies globally, are built for the most part on top of the so-called LAMP-stack. In other words their infrastructure is based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP – a selection of open source software programs.
Maintain Your Sticky Notes Online With Listhings.com
Listhings.com is a new Estonian "eco-friendly" online web tool for storing sticky notes about anything from To-Do lists to grocery lists and phone numbers.
The man behind the project is Martin Tajur, also Creative Director and co-founder of United Dogs and Cats (see our previous coverage). Martin has also worked as a graphical and user experience designer at Skype.
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Martin told us that the service has gathered a bit over thousand registered users since the beginning of the public sign-up period in mid-September 2009, in about one and a half months. He also continued that the amount of registered users seems to double in about a month's time, or even faster. It is also possible to use the service without signing up, and apparently many do. Just this week Listhings passed 100,000 saved notes.
According to Martin, the service started from a hobby project. He has been developing the service gradually, responding also to user feedback. Martin also emphasizes that Listhings is hosted in a 100% carbon neutral way, meaning that for all energy consumed to keep Listhings' servers running, Emission Reduction Credits are purchased. Thus the tagline "store notes, save trees".
The look and feel of the service is really nice. One can start creating notes right away and writing, resizing, changing color, and moving the notes around all work smoothly. It is also possible to create multiple canvases to get more space and add categorization for your notes. There aren't too many features for now, but just enough to efficiently do the trick.
There is a lot of potential in the service, and Listhings could a be great tool for creating and keeping track of notes at daily work, also on multiple computers. But to really unleash its potential and to consider giving up a physical notebook, a mobile app or access is clearly needed. Luckily, Martin has already indicated that an iPhone synchronization app is on the way and available soon.
Norfello launches Postita.fi service for sending snail mail over the web
Norfello, a software development and public web-based services company, has launched Postita.fi service (website currently in Finnish only, though the actual service offers English also), which allows the users to automate sending company letters.
After a simple registration one can start uploading PDF's to the service. After transferring some money into the account with a credit card (instant) or bank transfer, uploaded letters can be confirmed to be sent. Postita.fi automatically prints and mails the letters in a standard envelope to the recipients, by the following day if the material is uploaded before 11am the day before. The total price for 1-page letter is quite affordable 1.02€ incl. VAT. I tested the service and it seems to work quick and smooth - seems like an easy way to get rid of printing and mailing letters, if you are fine with standard envelopes.
Norfello was founded in 2005, and according to the company's web site they are privately held, have 13 employees, and are growing rapidly. The firm was recently part of the Finnish web 2.0 company group who made a field trip to San Francisco.
The company has previously introduced Laskulle.fi, which allows one to create PDF invoices by filling the simple form on the web site, free of charge and without registration in the basic version. It isn't too hard to see the automatic mailing feature of Postita.fi being introduced to Laskulle.fi quite soon.
Norfello seems to sit somewhere middle in what comes to e-invoice services. E-invoices have gained a lot of attention lately, and there's a lot of competition rising up in the SME segment. Verkkolaskut.fi is other Finnish-focused quite comprehensive service already (though the site brand is pretty poorly selected I'd say), among quite a big bunch of other small and bigger players. Might be Norfello tries a bit different approach to avoid the masses.
VentureBeat finds XIHA and Juhani
VentureBeat finds Juhani and his party list for San Francisco in a post titled Web 2.0 - The ultimate party.
If you haven't checked out Juhani's post yet on the parties do read it, lot's of interesting events if you're in San Francisco :)
Web 2.0 goes sailing
Are you aware that sailing enthusiasts earn annually almost double the income compared to amateur golfers in the US? That was news to me when I chatted with the co-founder of sailingregister.com (later abbreviated as SR), Vesa Lindqvist. They have tackled a tightly defined, but potentially lucrative, niche of sailing races.
SR offers something for all parties that include spectators, sailors and race officials. SR's key service is a secure sign-up system for sailors and race organizers. Sailing event organizers also lack proper services for providing race coverage for sailing spectators ashore and home. SR proposes to provide a reliable, secure and feature-rich alternative.
Their initial business model is to charge a premium from fees collected from race participants. However, the founders have a strong background of mobile business and we can expect the service to offer a range of premium rate mobile services for spectators in the future. Furthermore, they plan to offer social network driven marketing services to advertisers targeting this high-networth customer segment.
With many vertical social networks currently popping up this space is also contested with players such as Regatta Network and Compete-at-sailing. However, I believe SR is on the right track as they target enterprise customers as well with their marketing services. One has to bear in mind that according to Mr. Lindqvist, the total size of the sports industry internet spending in the US alone is circa $239 million.
SR is currently self-funded. They continue their negotiations with lead customers so that they will be ready for sailing season 2008.
I wish the SR guys all the best and good sailing.
