Erlend Wilhelmsen

3D Life

All of you thinking Second Life is it: Have a deep digg into what Google is doing with SketchUp. Accordning to TechCrunch, It is rumored that Google has acquired stealth start-up VuTool founded by Sebastian Thrun, Director of the Stanford AI Lab. No one will be surprised if Google soon anounces a major virtual world initiative.

Does Yahoo have the Answer?

I sure hope so. Yahoo Answers seems to be thriving, the user base is growing, and people really like it. Ithink Yahoo has figured out that it has the user base, brand, and internal strenght to compete with the new social networks without having to acquire other brands like FOX did with MySpace. I like that attitude - go for it!

MySpace is not the future

Why? Five words: FOX, Monetize, Control, Size, Competition. I predict that MySpace will become much less important in the next 12 months and ultimately loose it's position as #1 social network site (and on-line destination). Think I'm far out. Let's look at what's going on right now with MySpace...

1. FOX. That's right. FOX is the company that puts on people like Bill O'Reilly. Not exactly 2.0. Of course, we all know that FOX is capitalism - pure and simple. The question is: Will the driving forces of capitalism help or hurt the MySpace community? With arrogant people like COO Peter Chernin saying things like this, I'd say there's not much hope for change at FOX.

Online Social Networks are dead

Well, not exactly, but I got your attention. I told this to a client recently - mostly as a wake up call. Here's why: Every other client - even some of my friends - are talking about this or that social network (SN) Internet idea they have. I'm generally an optimistic person (I've even been called overly-optimistic); however, I'm a bit tired of it now. If you - or someone you know - are spending a lot of time thinking about starting your own Internet SN, here's a few thing you might want to consider...

Need a Travel Buddy?

Have a look at TravBuddy, a new play in the social networking space. I get the idea and I see that people would find some value in this. However, the User Interface needs a lot of work and the Google ads just makes little sense to me. If you run this venture, you want to increase average time spent on this site, right? The ads are not useful in this regard. The forums also do need some flavor. This is too dry for a travel play. Some promise here... but a long way to go.

CoRank

This start-up - CoRank - has the right idea. What your friends rank highly might be valuable to you as well. Collaborative filtering concepts like this has been difficult to get off the ground. One of the challenges is that the "perceived need" for this kind of service may not be that well understood in the mind of the consumer. Also, you'll need a large network of people to prove value unless you decide to focus on a niche. It may be worth having a second look at this in a month or so.

Sharpcast

I'm sure you've got multiple picture folders on different computers, cameras, and phones. Syncing becomes a hassle. I like this new product from SharpCast. It's got groupsync, auto-backup (thank you!), and mobile magic (which I have not tried yet, but it's said to push your camera phone photos to your desktop or your Web photo folder. There is clearly a need for this product. This company is on my "Companies to watch" list.

Share your recipes

Need a new recipe for your dinner party? Check out Group Recipes. This site is useful, it solves a real need, and its got flavor! I especially like the fact that it is possible to use the site without an account. For example, I found a recipe I liked and used the "send to my mobile phone" feature to grab it for tonight. It worked. Now, on to the cooking...

SpotPlex

SpotPlex is the new Digg. Kicked this one around a bit this morning. It does address one of the challenges with Digg - the fact that users submit stories directly. This one crawls participating sites directly and ranks according to how many people read the stories. When I tested it, I found it to be a bit slow. Worth keeping an eye on this one.