LetsBuyIt Blog

Everbody in Germany has heard about disputed Spickmich.de, the start-up of Tino Keller, Phillip Weisenhiller und Manuel Weisbrod. This teacher rating page has been in the media many times now and this TAZ article I think is one the most interesting ones.

That German teachers dislike criticism or feedback is well known (reasons undisclosed) but one teacher now had to find out the hard way at court that she cannot refrain her pupils to have an opinion about her. The court in Cologne has denied her to have the feedback and reviews about her deleted and she needs to face up to reality. Why is she worried that students say something about her if her teaching skills and methods are so impeccable?

Cool Stuff for Your Life Online. Simple Spark is the place to find and share a new world of web applications.

It’s the small ideas, those simple sparks of inspiration, that change the world. The web makes it possible. Simple Spark makes it a whole lot easier. Whether you’re a blogger looking to add functionality to your site, a business looking for tools, or a developer looking to create the next big thing, Simple Spark is the place to find cool stuff for your life online.

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

Let’s discover today Mindquarry

It’s advisable to pay attention when SAP co-founder and chairman Hasso Plattner invests in something. One of those ventures is Mindquarry, an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint that includes a Java-based desktop client with features for file and document sharing, task management, wiki editing, and collaboration in chat rooms and forums.

Mindquarry’s goal is it to develop the best combined environment for the collaborative chores of knowledge workers to

• help them to get rid of bothering extra work,
• increase their productivity and quality level and
• make their work become more joyful.

Mindquarry seeks to become the leader in collaborative software.

The Movers 2.0 project was created by Eran Arkin, one of the developers on the eSnips team. He was looking for something that allows people to track Web 2.0 metrics without working too hard. After we got addicted to it here at eSnips, we decided to let everyone enjoy it.

Movers 2.0 uses the alexa API but is not affiliated with alexa.com in any way.

http://movers20.esnips.com/

Nearly a quarter of upstream clicks to the top 19 social sites originated from one place on the Web, according to a report from Hitwise.

Social networking sites are feeding off each other’s good will, according to a new report by competitive intelligence service company Hitwise.

Facebook’s traffic has doubled in just over 18 months, but MySpace still receives most of the Web’s social networking traffic. MySpace captured 79.7% of social networking traffic in April, according to figures released by Hitwise on Monday. Facebook accounted for 11.47% of social networking visits, while MySpace alterative Bebo drew 1.28% of the traffic last month, according to the Hitwise report.

MySpace visits rose 70% from April 2006 to April 2007, while the percentage increase for the lesser-used sites was much more dramatic, according to Hitwise. Facebook visits increased 126% from April 2006 and Bebo’s traffic rose 184% from last year, Hitwise announced.

Most companies are more concerned with blocking Web site categories, such as those labeled “adult” or “gambling,” than with targeting individual Web sites, a new report notes.

When the Defense Department recently banned department personnel from visiting social networking and entertainment sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and 11 others, it cited bandwidth constraints and security concerns as the primary criteria. In the business world, however, while these sites don’t exactly boost productivity, companies are much more concerned with shutting out banner and pop-up ads as well as adware likely to install cookies on company-owned PCs.

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

Let’s discover today OpenTeams

Unlike normal wikis, which suffer from user apathy and confusion, OpenTeams is intuitive for non-techies to learn and use. Its simple email-like interface makes it easy to create, organize, and navigate content while transparently tracking changes. This dramatically shrinks the learning curve and ensures adoption while ramping up productivity, payback, and employee engagement.

OpenTeams claims it has “reinvented” the wiki, and sure enough it’s come close with an interface that greets users with a three-pane look and feel reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook.

• The left-hand pane is a list of topics and colleagues to track,
• the middle pane lists documents that fall within individual topics or are created by those colleagues,
• and the right pane shows an individual document.

OpenTeams also makes it easier to track changes to the wiki — something often tough to do without looking at individual page history — by notifying users of any changes made to a page they’ve been tracking. Another smartly added feature: integrating related wiki pages into a hierarchical “briefing” or narrative view of an idea or proposal.

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

And just as in the consumer Web, from mashups to wikis, startups abound. To differentiate from big companies, they’ll have to do things differently.

Let’s start by discovering iotum

iotum is a company which empowers conversations by connecting people where, when and how they choose. iotum’s software platform immediately makes people more productive, accessible and in control of their communications.

It delivers benefits to

• consumers
• mobile professionals
• enterprises

Presence technology aims to make communication smarter by letting people know if someone is available to take a call. The reality is that presence is typically a pain to constantly update and stumbles at organizational boundaries. Startup iotum’s “relevance engine” automates the process, and its hosted services get rid of those boundaries.

The relevance engine pings a user’s instant messaging client, calendar, recent call history, and list of important contacts to automatically determine how calls should be handled or what presence information should be displayed to a potential caller. For example, if it sees a salesperson’s been calling a customer a lot recently, iotum’s Talk-Now app for BlackBerrys might escalate that customer’s importance so the customer could see the salesperson’s presence information or have his calls patched through more often.

“Web 2.0 is all about openness and freedom,” said Kris Lamb, a director with IBM’s Internet Security Systems, in an interview at Interop. “You’re really tearing down the traditional barriers that have kept companies safe. What does security mean for Web 2.0 when you can’t make really clear distinctions between ‘this is what we allow to happen,’ and ‘this is what we don’t allow.’”

As more companies deploy cool Web 2.0 technologies, careful planning is required to avoid new kinds of security problems.
Web 2.0 isn’t just for the likes of MySpace and YouTube anymore. Mainstream companies are catching the fever, ramping up their Web sites and creating communities of their customers.

The only problem is, they might be rushing headlong into something that could put their network — and their customers — at risk.

“They’ve got to think about security,” said Lamb. “It can’t be an afterthought. It has to be part of a larger decision-making process If it’s not, there’s a lot of risk.”

How do you (or your company) deal with these issues?

You’ve compared feature lists and read all the consumer reviews. You’ve narrowed your choices to one or two models. Now you wonder: Who carries this product near me? Is it on sale?

You’ll find the answers at Krillion, but that’s for the US.

Krillion is the leader in actionable local search; local search that results in consumers taking action to buy. Krillion’s mission is to transform the way ready-to-buy consumers find and buy national brands, locally. Based on its unique Krillion Localization Engine, Krillion search results are more accurate than any local search information available on the Internet. Krillion, founded in February 2006, is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

You have a similar service for the UK with Ask The Local.

What about the rest of Europe?

Of course LetsBuyIt studied this trend closely … stay tuned