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Internet and Marketing consultancy

Archive for May, 2009

Belgian Webmission: Entrepreneurs to San Francisco

May 23

Posted by Frederic in Initiatives | No Comments

The Webmission idea started with two Belgian web developers: Laurent Eschenauer from Liège, who created the  Life Stream tool Storytlr (which he was invited to present by Google) and Xavier Damman from Nivelles, who launched Commentag, a tool that aims to organize the masses of information tha goes through the Micro-Blogging tool Twitter.

Initially, they were to go to San Francisco to attend the Google I/O conference, a huge gathering of web developers, and to stay a week to visit the local start-ups. Then the idea just grew and other start-ups, developers and Belgian web enthusiasts were kindly invited to join the mission. Read the rest of this entry »

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Wolfram|Alpha goes live

May 16

Posted by Frederic in Initiatives | No Comments

Wolfram|Alpha is live since last night.

What Wolfram|Alpha? Although it may look like a search engine characterized by its simple interface, Wolfram Alpha can more be defined as a knowledge base or an answer engine. This “Computational Knowledge Engine” as they call it has been developed by a team led by British mathematician Steven Wolfram.

The lon- term goal of the site is to make “all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone”. The site, which is very focussed on the “English-speaking knowledge” today, will not give you a list of web sites as a traditional search engine, but the answers to your questions in a structured form. A dream for every lazy student. Read the rest of this entry »

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Truvolabs launches private beta

May 13

Posted by Frederic in (Local) Search, Social Media | No Comments

truvolabs-logoWith the team Truvolabs, a small group of Ruby on Rails experts installed in the Netherlands, Truvo has been working for the last few weeks on a new concept of local search online, which will be simply called Truvo.com for the time being.

The concept’s goal is to combine the strengths of Web 2.0 with the structure of a traditional publisher. Truvo invites surfers to sign up to be able to share their opinions and discover the ideas of other surfers in their community, but on the basis of a quality database that has been pre-treated, enriched, and distilled by the team responsible for the edition of the Golden Pages in print and online. Read the rest of this entry »

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Traditional advertising is still relevant, even Google thinks so

May 10

Posted by Frederic in Marketing and Advertising | No Comments

For years, Google has succeeded in building the most valuable brand of the world while hardly doing any traditional advertising.

google-on-nytimes-tbnWhether it’s through technical innovations or with anecdotes, Google succeeds to appear in the media very often against a very sharp marketing budget.

Having said this, let’s not forget that Google isn’t always number one. It’s actually pretty common to see Google struggling in other domains than search.

The most typical case is probably the web browser Google Chrome, which seems to be the exception to Google’s marketing rule of not marketing in a traditional way. It started in Japan with a TV advertising (pretty conceptual) in the beginning of the year and more recently in the States.

Last week, Read the rest of this entry »

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Shift in Marketing Reality

May 2

Posted by Frederic in Marketing and Advertising | No Comments

The reality has clearly changed, the ways you can and have to communicate about your products or services have changed as well.

This has been nicely illustrated in the following graphic movie realized by the German Advertising Agency, Scholz & Friends.

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