May 17, 2006

Social Media Explosion in Flattening World

Innovate!Europe 2006, Zaragoza, Spain, heard a fascinating sequence of presentations from young companies innovating in the social media space. Social media covers blogs, user-generated content, social networks and online communities.

The session was led by Loic Le Meur, one of Europe's most influential bloggers and winner of the innovator of the year award at Innovate!Europe 2005. Highlighting the speed this trend is moving, Loic said "Podcasts are already challenging TV and radio, just like blogs are seriously challenging the press." Loic pointed out that blogging is fast becoming an every day medium not a techno peculiarity. "There are now more podcasts than radio stations," he said, "and only a third of blog posts are in English. A hundred million people use Skype."

Loic said these phenomena show a new type of citizenship is emerging across a fast flattening world. People are talking to directly each other rather than via the traditional political and media establishments. Loic, whose day job is Executive V-P & General Manager EMEA at Six Apart, introduced five social media innovators:

GTP Solutions of Greece is among the companies at this Innovate!Europe offering a Web 2.0 solution. Dr. Nicholas Ampazis, the professor who heads the company, demoed Feeds 2.0 a personalized RSS aggregator that prioritizes incoming information according to the user's interests.

Skinkers, which has developed a second generation push messaging chain. The system answers one-to-many messaging needs that email can't cope with. The company has a roster of blue-chip clients.

Wakoo has a solution that enables bloggers to easily create realtime chat. The baby of two young French entrepreneurs, Wakoo also has a service for business blogs that avoids the spam threat.

Nooked from Ireland has already built a worldwide customer base for its RSS marketing solutions and is market leader in its sector.

Wee World promises to infect the net with the most irritating characters to sane adults since the Windows paperclip. Its online service allows users to create WeeMees, customizable avatars that can be used as identifiers on all kinds of mobile and online communications. Through gritted teeth we are bow in admiration to Wee World's $20+mn in funding and a partner list that includes Microsoft Messenger, Motorola, Skype and Vodafone. With over half a million sign-ups a month, Wee World is one of the world's fastest growing communities.

Posted by Philip Gallagher at May 17, 2006 02:33 PM