Germany’s most anticipated Web 2.0 sites

Germany’s most anticipated Web 2.0 sites - one year later

I just came across a post about Germany's most anticipated Web2.0 sites that dates back to last August. Since this is almost exactly one year ago I decided to spend half an hour of my life and conduct a completely unscientific survey to see how many of these startups are still around. For this reason I simply looked at the web sites to see if they are still here and checked if there are recent posts in the company blog to check if the site is a zombie (if there is no blog I checked the press releases). The result is: 51% are still around, 36% are gone (or not started one year later). The rest seems shaky (last blog post 6 months ago) or unknown (state cannot be determined by looking at the blog).

If you consider that these startups were above the rest ("highly anticipated") and that checking if there are even online one year later is a very low barrier I was surprised by the low survival ratio. But one can regard this as positive: "quick failure" is a good strategy for testing ideas.

Comments

Unknown said…

hi, could you fix please provided link, it seems to be broken. thx, great idea to make updates on start ups.

3:23 AM

Michael Marth said…

The post (and the whole blog) are gone, but archive.org still has the content:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071221233853/http://de.blognation.com/2007/08/27/germanys-most-anticipated-web-20-sites

4:02 AM

What is Multi-Tenancy? A closer look

Lately, I had a lot of conversations about multi-tenancy (MT). So I finally wrote up my thoughts on that term. In this post I will argue that MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable. Therefore, any statement about a system being “MT” can only be made in the context of the given requirements. It is not a property of the system itself . I will also show that perfect multi-tenancy is indistinguishable from single-tenancy (ST). MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable Imagine a step-function "ST-MT" (values are either 0 or 1) that determines if a given system is MT (1) or ST (0). That function will look like this: ST-MT = function (system, business requirements) Look at the function’s arguments: the first one is obvious – the result will depend on the system itself. The second one is more interesting: it is the cumulative set of business requirements . Typically, these requirements will include: Resource sharing: systems typically declare...

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...

Second FISE Hackathon

At this week's IKS meeting at Paderborn the second FISE Hackathon took place. FISE is an open source semantic engine that provides semantic annotation algorithms like semantic lifting. The actual annotation algorithms are pluggable through OSGi. Existing CMSs can integrate the engine through an HTTP interface (inspired from Solr ). Last week, Bertrand gave an introductory talk about FISE that is available online . There was no explicitly set goal for the second Hackathon. Rather, the existing code base was extended in various different directions. Some examples: a language detection enhancement engine (I am particularly glad to see this - automatic language detection in CMSs is a pet passion of mine) a UI for FISE users that allows humans to resolve ambiguities myself, I coded a JCR-based storage engine for the content and annotations There was also a good amount of work done on the annotation structure used by FISE and documented on the IKS wiki . A complete report of the Hack...

Coffee & Gems

Search This Blog